The Future of Media: Why Only 3 Platforms Will Matter

Welcome. In this video, we're going to talk about the future of media. What channels are actually going to be working in the next five years? Where do you want to build an audience now so that in the next couple of years, you will continue to be successful? We also talk about all the new features that Beehive launched. launched 10 new features. They can really change the direction for their company. So we'll break those down in this video. We talk about the magic formula.

that converts your social audience, your followers, your views on social platforms into email subscribers. The only five ways that you can get people off social media and onto your email list. And we also talked about the best way to stand out in the crowded.

inbox. If you're new here, my name is Matt. I help media founders and creators build their businesses. We've helped clients add over 10 million email subscribers and over $100 million in sales collectively. All right, let's get into it. Let's do it.

What do you think newsletter or content platforms will look like five years from now? Well, I'll just answer it with what I think channels or platforms are going to look like in general five years from now. And also what platforms are still going to be around and relevant five years from now. I really think the future of media and the content economy is going to be three main channels and really two primary ones. So the three channels are.

Probably an order of importance. Newsletters and email. That is probably the most Lindy of them all. So like it's been around for the longest thing. Email's been around for like 43 years. It's likely to be around for at least another 43 years. Email has billions of users, and it's actually still growing every single year. Almost all adults use email on a daily basis, or at least every workday.

And I think that's the primary place that you want to move your audience to so you can build a deep relationship with them and monetize them most effectively. Email is just better at monetization than anything else. If you want to sell things to people, you got to get them.

on an email newsletter. But you still need those discovery platforms to reach new audiences and build awareness, of course. And I think the future of discovery is YouTube. YouTube is just the new TV, like more connected TV time. is spent on YouTube than things like Netflix or Max or HBO or stuff like that. So those are the two primary ones. I think the third one is podcasts because there's no deeper relationship that you can have with an audience than podcasts.

You build this like parasocial relationship with the podcasters that you listen to. You trust them when they ask you to do something. You really follow through if you value their opinion and perspective. I think podcasts are super powerful. But what I'm worried about with podcast is that.

most of the podcasting audiences are just going to go to YouTube. YouTube has changed the platform a lot to optimize for podcasts, whether it's clips or podcast episodes, like episode timelines in the YouTube app. I think most people are moving their...

their podcast time to YouTube. So they're spending less time on like Apple Podcasts or Spotify and spending more time listening to the same types of podcasts on YouTube. Oftentimes if their phone closed, if they use YouTube premium, it must have tens of millions or more subscribers right now.

And so if I were a podcaster, I would be kind of concerned about that as like, am I going to have an RSS feed that's worth, that's valuable as a part of my business? Or is everybody just going to move over to YouTube? And one of the problems with YouTube is it's still all algorithm based. Like no one checks their YouTube subscriber tab.

They just either search things or they click on things that pop up in their feed or their suggested videos. And one of the problems with that as a podcaster is you have this great chronological timeline. Like you publish a podcast. If someone's subscribed, it's going to show up on their podcast feed.

in that timeline, in that correct order. You don't have an algorithm that may show it or may not show it based off of a bunch of different variables. As a podcaster, I would be worried and I would be, frankly, just giving in to what's happening. which is YouTube is dominant, so I would focus on building video assets in YouTube and then moving those people from YouTube to my newsletter, to my email list.

So I think those three platforms are the primary future of media, at least digital media. And I think if you're building an audience elsewhere on a platform like LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook.

Twitter, so on and so forth. I think you need to think about how are you going to figure out either YouTube videos and newsletters or both? And because you want your primary audience to be there, not on a platform like... twitter instagram where the algorithm changes constantly and you don't really have a meaningful audience relationship like you don't tune into a twitter account but you do like tune into youtube videos you do look forward to reading

the good newsletters in your inbox. And there's just something about that medium where it's like, it feels like a real show, like a real valuable thing worth consuming. If it's a podcast, a video or a newsletter, if it's not one of those three things, and it's just another LinkedIn post.

and you're trying to build your entire business on that, I would be really worried. So that's where I think we're headed. It's not a crazy prediction because I'm not predicting like some new AI platform or anything like that. I'm just trying to predict like what's working now and what's going to continue to. in that direction in the future. So you talk a lot about discovery platforms and repurposing content on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube. How do you actually drive traffic?

from one platform to your newsletter and encourage people really to bounce off of the platform that they're browsing content on. So this person wants to take the audience they've built up on social. YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever, and move that to their email list, grow their newsletter from these platforms. And it's a good question. So what I use is what I call the magic framework. I've got tens of thousands.

of subscribers from social. I've helped clients do way more than that. And after doing this for a long time, I found there's really only five ways to convert your social followers and views on these discovery platforms to your email lists. And that's what the magic framework is all about.

So MAGIC is an acronym. M stands for magnets or lead magnets. A stands for teasers, what we call pre and post call to actions. G stands for giveaways. I stands for inbox, where you're DMing your followers. And C stands for a complete profile.

So just to explain what I mean by that, magnets, lead magnets, you need to have some type of incentive or bribe to get people off social media and onto your email. So just saying something like, hey, please join my newsletter. That's not going to cut it. It's not giving me a reason to really take action right now.

and actually click on something, enter my email address and signed up. So you have to have lead magnets to convert people successfully. And if you just do this first thing, lead magnets, you're going to be 10 times more successful than if you don't have a lead magnet at all.

Create a lead magnet, promote it in your profile at the end of your post, at the end of your videos. One thing that works really well on YouTube is a lead magnet that's related to the video topic. So if you're doing a video about any topic, let's say how to do reef keeping. for fish that are in like salt water then you would have like a reef keeping setup guide related to that for example i mean

Silly example, but there's dozens of different ways to do this. So ideally the lead magnets related to the piece of content that you're posting. One way that I've found is the most successful way to use lead magnets is with any type of comment to get strategy. We do this on LinkedIn a lot on a weekly basis. It works really well on Instagram too, on Twitter, on Facebook. And you basically just do a post about

how awesome the lead magnet is, the piece of free content you're giving away. And then you ask people, comment this word to get it. And you have a word related to the lead magnet. So it could be saltwater, it could be fish, it could be newsletter. Any one word that's easy to type, people comment that.

And then you DM them a link to a landing page where they can enter their email address, get the lead magnet, and of course, join your newsletter. And those comments increase the engagement on the post so more people see it, more people comment, and it creates this kind of viral... giveaway cycle. Ask is any type of call to action.

But the best type of call to action to grow your email list is a pre or post call to action. So a pre call to action or pre CTA is just when you post a teaser about what your newsletter covers, usually about a day before the newsletter goes out.

So you just tell people, here's all the cool stuff I'm covering in my newsletter tomorrow. If you want to get this content, click here to subscribe or go to my link in bio to subscribe. A post called action is when you just tease what you already sent out. So you could say. I just sent out this free guide on XYZ to 10,000 subscribers. If you missed it and you still want to receive it, click here. Click the link in my bio, comment.

this word and i'll send it to you and then you send people to your landing page or you could send people to an email gated version of that newsletter as a blog post where they have to enter in their email address to subscribe and get instant access to that content

that you just published. So it's kind of like a lead magnet but it's a different type of lead magnet essentially. Then we have giveaways for G and that's just why I talked about those common to get giveaways. It's really straightforward but most people don't do it and it works super well. So you create that lead magnet.

You ask people to comment, you give it away. That's super powerful. That's a lot more effective than doing a giveaway that's not a content-based giveaway. So if you give away like, hey, I'm going to give away a MacBook.

to one person who joins my newsletter this month, you're going to attract the wrong types of subscribers. You're going to attract freebie seekers. But if you give away content that your ideal subscriber wants and they sign up to get that, you're going to grow a high quality and engaged email list.

Then we have I inbox. So DM in your followers. It sounds like too simple, but it probably works better than all of this stuff. So if someone just followed you, they're already warm. They already know you and like you in some way. So why not ask them to sign up?

politely and most of your followers are not going to know if you have a newsletter until you actually tell them and do this so every new connection i get every new follower i get i have my virtual assistant send a dm like this and we can put it up on screen but it's something like hey name thanks for the follow

good to connect. If you're looking for my best content on XYZ, I only share with newsletter subscribers. If you want to sign up and get one email a week, go here. In any case, I'll see you around LinkedIn. I'll see you around Instagram, et cetera. And you can edit that message to fit. your style, your newsletter. But we're often converting 10, 30% of our followers just by sending that one simple DM to someone who followed us within 24 hours of them following or connecting with us.

And then C is complete profile. So just optimizing your social profile, your social bio to get newsletter subscribers. Also sounds simple, but most people just don't do this. You need to treat your social profile like a landing page. that's designed to convert your visitors into followers and email subscribers. So have a call to action for your newsletter. Have a clear value proposition of how you help your ideal audience. Optimize that profile and make sure the link in your profile

goes to your newsletter landing page, not a link tree. If you send people to a link tree of like five or 10 different links, only a fraction of them are going to click on your newsletter page and a fraction of those people are going to subscribe. So maybe...

you'll convert 5% or 10% of people who click on your link tree to a newsletter subscriber. But if your only link in bio is your newsletter landing page, you're going to convert 50... 60% of that traffic into a newsletter subscriber and then what you can do is maybe you still want to tell them about your other stuff like your YouTube channel your podcast your products

Just link to that stuff on your thank you page so people see it after they subscribe to your newsletter. And you'll make more money that way because you'll have more people on your email list that you can notify about your other products, your other content, your other offers, stuff like that. So that's the magic formula or framework.

And if you're doing all five of those things and executing them, you're going to convert 10, 20, 50% of your social followers into subscribers. If you're doing none of these things or none of them well, you're not going to grow at all from social.

All right. On a similar note, this is an audience question this week. How do you recommend or do you recommend inserting paywalls halfway through your content for a paid? kind of upgrade. Obviously adds friction, but can certainly help with conversions. How do you recommend either gating free content, gating premium content? What's kind of your strategy there?

Well, if you have a paid subscription or membership business model, you have to use paywalls. It's one of the most powerful ways to get people.

to sign up for your membership or subscription because they see content they want, they can't access it, so they pay to get it. And maybe they're not going to pay on the first paywall, but after a handful of paywalls, they're going to do so. So you should be having paywalls. You should have paywalls on your website. You should send newsletters that are paywalled.

that teases the content and then gets people to pay to read it. One of the most important parts of a paywall is just what percentage of the content is visible. Usually like it's the first. couple paragraphs or the first 10%, there's like a headline, a couple sentences, and then it hits a paywall. And writing that in a way that teases people, gets them excited, and really sells the content so they actually sign up and read. Like if the hook of that paywalled article isn't good.

you're not going to get any conversions from paywalls. So that's really key. And people who have big paid subscription businesses, they spend a lot of time making that hook good so that their paywalls do convert. You should do it. I use like the barbell strategy here. And I've talked to a lot of publishers who this works for. So either all of your paid content, like all of your content for the subscription is paywalled, 100% of it or 90% or a very small percent.

like 10, 20% and most of it is free. And you use that free content to attract more audience, more email subscribers, and then you continue to pitch them the paywall down the line. So I would go in one of those two directions. I wouldn't do like 50%. But the reality is everybody's different. What I would do is look at successful paywall businesses. I would look at something like Tangle News.

built an audience from scratch. Now they have like 70,000 paid subscribers. And look at how their paywall strategy works. Look at New York Times. I think it's puck.news or pucknews is their website. I think they go that 100% model and that works great for them. But something like Tangle does the 10 or 20% model. And so the best way to learn what to paywall, how to write these paywall hooks is to look at people who are doing it well. So find...

10 or 20 examples of people building membership businesses around paywalls. Look at what they're doing. Copy that. All right. I want to do a quick Beehive roundup. They just had their winter release with a bunch of new features. So just got a couple rapid fire questions related to Beehive.

Do you want to jump in? Yeah, let's do it. So first off, just for maybe smaller creators, zero to a thousand subscribers, which of these new features should they utilize and be most excited about? For those folks, I would say too, I think the website builder is awesome.

It's definitely not perfect yet, and they're making improvements to it on a regular basis, but it just allows you to have... everything on beehive and so one of the challenges when you're launching a newsletter in media business or anything really is that like okay i gotta set up my website with this tool i gotta set up my newsletter and email marketing with this other tool

I got to have a link in bio tool for this and this for that. And you waste all this time on tech setup and building things and designing websites and logos that nobody ever sees because you're just starting, right? And what you really want to focus on is... publishing content, growing your audience and monetizing your audience and not all the tech stuff. And so if you can do everything with Beehive, I would encourage you to do that. So build your website on Beehive with the website builder.

They have an AI tool now where you can prompt it and tell it what you want. That will build the website for you. And then you can make small adjustments with their drag and drop builder. So just do everything on Beehive. And then one of the features that will be really cool in the long run for...

Smaller creators, but really everybody is the ad network. Not many people have talked about this, but Beehive has this ad network and they're building kind of a self-serve model so that marketers and advertisers can go in. Instead of having to talk to a salesperson or do this and that and follow up over email multiple times, they can just buy ads in newsletters just like you buy ads on Meta, Facebook and Instagram. And so Beehive is able to grow this ad network and get thousands.

and maybe eventually tens of thousands of marketers on board, you could have potentially limitless ad inventory in your newsletter. So from day one, whether you have one or 10,000 subscribers, you have ads from...

you know, legit relevant brands in your newsletter and you're monetizing it right away. Now, are you going to make as much money from those ads as ads that you sell directly or from selling a product to your audience? Probably not, but it's a great way to cover your costs, build momentum and get started.

And so that will apply both to the beginners and the more advanced publishers too. Another thing is just like native website analytics. A lot of beginners, like they don't know how to use Google Analytics. They don't set it up. They don't really want to learn it. So just having that built into Beehive is so powerful. So you can see, okay, where's my website traffic coming from? Is it search? Is it Twitter? Is it whatever? What growth channel should I double down on and keep?

pursuing that are actually working just having visibility into how your business and newsletter is actually growing is so huge and a lot of people just don't have that because they don't either know how to use an analytics platform or they haven't tried it yet or haven't explored it yet

Yeah, we actually had another audience question, which was like, how do I know when a discovery channel is worthwhile? And I think this blends into that, which is now you can really just through Beehive understand, hey, is LinkedIn driving organic growth? Is YouTube driving organic growth?

and really see those numbers pretty simply. Yeah, you can see the traffic by source and you can also see your signups by source. And maybe you could look at, hey, I've got a thousand website visitors from LinkedIn, but I only have, you know, 10 or 50. subscribers from linkedin well that is going to tell you that your conversion rate optimization on your website on your landing page on your blog post are bad and then you can go in and improve that

and then convert more of that traffic into subscribers. Or if maybe you were spending a ton of time optimizing for Twitter and like you're just not getting traffic there, you can cut that and focus more time on LinkedIn or something else. So another one that they recently launched was Dynamic Content. Maybe give a brief.

breakdown on what it is, and then specifically, like, how do you plan to utilize that? How do you recommend maybe more advanced strategies of how operators could use, utilize dynamic content? Yeah, so this, it... It's actually kind of hard to explain because it allows you to tailor what your newsletter readers see based off of what BeHive calls custom fields, but a custom field could be based off of their location.

their interests, their survey responses, their subscription tier, what products they bought, basically almost an endless possibility of data that you have on your newsletter subscribers. You can customize what content they see in your emails and your newsletters with this dynamic content.

and so like some basic stuff you could do with it is you could do dynamic ads so you could have different ads for different interests so maybe some people are uh some of your subscribers are like more advanced and some are more beginner and you show each of them different messaging for the ad that's most relevant to them. Maybe some are male, some are female, and you show different ads based off of that. It could be different messaging. It could be totally different.

ads. You can also do dynamic marketing copy. So maybe you have an offer you're selling, but you know there's like three core segments of your audience that really all have different needs. And so you could address those needs separately with this dynamic content feature. Now you do need to collect this data.

And you're going to collect that data mostly through a post signup survey. And that's why those are so important. So after someone signs up for your newsletter, they're redirected to a multiple choice survey where you ask.

these questions that will inform how you use dynamic content or that will help you use dynamic content in other tools as well. Like you can send automated emails or segmented email blast based off of survey responses. So that's why it's so important to have a survey. If you want to see our survey, you can.

click the first link in the bio below and subscribe to our newsletter and see what this survey looks like. So I think it's huge for every publisher. It's also something that like the enterprise people really want. So maybe if you're a publisher that has millions of subscribers, you're a seven, eight.

figure business or more, you probably already have a dynamic content with all the advanced tech that your team has set up. But if you want to now transition to Beehive, it makes more sense to do so because Beehive has that feature as well.

And so it's going to help Beehive close more big accounts because Beehive kind of started with smaller creators, smaller publishers, and they're slowly going up market over time. Do you think Beehive will ever really integrate more with Shopify or become more e-commerce driven or kind of stay out of that lane?

I think an integration would be cool. I think trying to become the email service provider for Shopify and for e-commerce business. businesses is a bad idea. Tools like Klaviyo have really dominated that market and Beehive can own this kind of like media education content economy space.

And that's, you know, a trillion dollar industry. They don't need to go into the e-commerce industry to be successful. And frankly, if they do that, there's like two different product directions they would have to balance. And that's just impossible. And it would probably make the product worse. So I think Beehive adding. you know, more integrations with Shopify so that people who are like more of a media focused business, but they also sell physical products.

could use Beehive as their primary ESP and not use Klaviyo is a great idea, but I don't think they should try and go and build everything that Klaviyo's building either. So final Beehive-related question here.

Do you think this puts more pressure on Kit and Substack to evolve? Do you think each of them are kind of already in their own lane and winning? And then if you were advising maybe Substack or Kit, would you have a product recommendation for them to jump on and catch up? Yeah. Substack and Kit are very different products and they are basically competitors to Beehive and I'm a fan of all of these tools, Beehive, Substack, Kit and other ones as well.

We have clients who use all this stuff. Substack is definitely headed in the social direction where they're building their own platform, kind of like... a mix between Twitter and Medium. If anybody remembers Medium, like the blogging platform, like Substack is basically becoming that. It's a closed ecosystem. It's not quite a tool that you can use to power your media business like Kit is or Beehive is or something like a high level or MailChimp is.

So it's like you're more of a substacker than you are a publisher or creator, which I don't like. I think it's going to be very hard to build big, sustainable businesses on a closed platform like Substack. They're just going down that path. I don't think that's going to change. Like they want to build the next social platform, have newsletters as a smaller part of that. Kit's already doing a lot of great stuff. I think they just need to build out some of the, they have some features that.

are probably better than Beehive, and then they're missing some features that Beehive has that Kit doesn't. And so I think they're already working on more feature parity with Beehive, also improving what they're already good at. The biggest thing I've heard from Kit users about what they want is more analytics.

I don't keep up with every feature every week, right? But it's hard to see your subscriber growth and engagement by source. So if I got 100 signups from Twitter, 200 from Facebook ads, 1,000 from Google search. With Beive, I can identify that and I can see their email engagement, their open rate by source, their upgrade to my paid membership rate by source.

With Kit, I don't have that same type of tracking by channel and analytics by channel ability. And so I think Kit's a really great product, but it's missing some of the analytics stuff that Beehive has that their users really like. And I think they're... They're working on improving the product a lot, and I'm sure they'll do that soon. In your opinion, what's the most underrated moat a newsletter can build that's really hard to copy in today's age?

I would say that if you're building a media business and you're doing less than $1 to $3 million per year, you don't need to think about moats. You just need to think about how to get more subscribers, leads, customers, and how to do a great job serving them. build a positive reputation in your niche and your industry. Just do the fundamentals. I think people think about how to build the perfect business with the perfect moat, and they get paralysis by analysis, rather.

And they don't take any action on the things that actually matter day to day. And so I don't think you should think about moats much. But the biggest moat is your personal monopoly. Like there's only one of you. And if you can show your unique perspective and taste. and value and personality to the world. And you keep doing that for years and you build a reputation like there's no one who can compete on exactly what.

you do better than anyone else. So I love that term. I think David Perel kind of coined that personal monopoly. I think that's your moat in the media and creator world. I don't think you're going to have a moat like an Amtrak or some type of like huge. enterprise software business has, I would focus on the fundamentals. How do you think reader behavior might change as inboxes continue to get more crowded?

I would say that everything is getting more crowded all the time. Social media is getting more crowded. There's more accounts posting on all these platforms. There's more podcasts. There's more YouTube channels. There's more newsletters too. And that's not necessarily going away. Email still gives you the unique advantage.

where you have this direct connection with your audience you send an email to a thousand people a thousand people get an email and of course there's still the promotions folder and all those things but there's strategies that we teach on this channel to help you overcome that so if you just create insanely valuable content you're going to be fine And what users or readers can do in the inbox is they just have so much more power and control.

They can choose what they like and what they don't like. They can unsubscribe with one click now. And so if you continue creating great content, you're actually going to stand out more in the inbox in the future. than less because users can curate what they want versus on social media where everything is an algorithmic for you feed. You know, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok is just throwing everything at you.

That's where the noise is. So getting people off platform onto email where there's less noise is the right thing to do. And one trend we're seeing is just getting easier and easier to unsubscribe. I think Gmail added the one-click unsubscribe feature about a year ago at this point.

And Gmail now has a managed subscriptions feature where you can click in your inbox and you can see all of the email or newsletter subscriptions you have and you can unsubscribe from them. Funny enough, you can't unsubscribe in one click. You have to click unsubscribe and then click again to confirm that.

But that basically just allows people to filter their inbox to what they want it to be, which is good because if you have great content, now you're going to stand out even more. So I think maybe there's more newsletters appearing over time.

But the inbox has allowed users to filter it better than ever. So if you're truly good and you have a high signal to noise ratio, I think you have an advantage the way the inbox is changing right now. Along those lines, how do you see B2B newsletters evolving?

if differently at all, than more consumer-focused ones in the next couple years. I don't see a huge difference in strategy between the two or how it's going to evolve. And I wouldn't think of yourself as a B2B newsletter. I would think of yourself as a B2B publisher.

or media company and newsletter is probably going to be one of your primary channels, but it's not going to be your only channel and shouldn't be your only channel. A lot of them are more like beginner people I talk to who would probably call themselves B2B newsletters. They're just not doing all the monetization strategies that the, you know, seven, eight figure B2B companies are doing. So for example, they're just selling newsletter ads like.

a native ad spot or a banner in their newsletter but when you talk to these b2b publishers they don't have just newsletter ads they have the ability to promote a custom report and lead magnet they have the ability to promote webinars they have the ability to do events they have the ability to do dedicated email sends to their list. They usually have four or five different partnership options that are really focused on.

generating leads for their advertisers. And a lot of the beginners don't take that seriously or they just don't do it. So I would go look at other B2B publishers in your category. Go look at IndustryDAV, go look at SmartBrief and a ton more. And then... you know, reach out to their partnership teams, kind of act like you're an advertiser and just see what their packages look like, see what their advertising services look like and emulate more of that stuff.

Because as a B2B publisher, you're not really just a publisher or a media company or a creator. You're more of a marketing partner for the brands that you work with. So you need to think about yourself as a marketing agency.

and approach it from that perspective, not just a publisher selling ad space in your newsletter. What's your advice for someone who's been sitting on a newsletter idea for six months and hasn't launched yet? I think we're coming around kind of the end of the year here and certainly a great opportunity to still jump in.

immediate recommendation would you have or would you recommend for somebody to jump in yeah you just gotta do it because when it comes to media really most business models it's entirely an execution game and the idea It doesn't really matter. You can't figure out what a good newsletter idea or content idea is in a vacuum, just in your mind or talking with friends or family. You have to go and get market feedback.

You don't even have to launch a newsletter immediately. You could just spin up a landing page of Beehive or Substack or whatever and just start posting about the content around that idea on one social platform of your choice, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever it is, and just start trying to get...

eyeballs on it, get views, get engagement, get followers. Later, you can worry about getting those people onto your email list. And we've talked about a lot of strategies to do so. But you just got to get those ideas out in the world to see if you can validate them. And what I would encourage you to do is do the 1K challenge. It's a 30-day challenge where you launch your newsletter and you post approximately five times per week on social.

You publish about five pieces of content per week, and we've had dozens of people follow that and get their first 1000 subscribers in 30 days. So do that. We'll put a link to the 1K Challenge in the video description below. It's the best way to start a newsletter and get traction really quickly. And don't worry about if your idea isn't perfect because it's always going to change based off of market feedback and reader feedback and the best way to.

to win and be successful is just to start getting that feedback as soon as possible. I'm a big believer that you don't get better by writing or researching, you just get better by publishing. So a lot of people listen to this, they want to be writers, they want to build an audience. And a lot of...

Those people, including myself, start by like writing stuff and then publishing it to like a blog that no one sees or just does a draft and they never share it. But that doesn't improve your writing. Only publishing does. So you just got to publish stuff. So off of that question, I think maybe we've asked this before, but how do you know when you actually have?

audience market fit. There's also no magic formula for audience market fit or content market fit. But I would say if you can reach north of a thousand subscribers organically. Your newsletter has a 50% or 60% plus unique open rate. It has a 5% or 10% plus unique click-through rate. You're getting a couple positive replies from most of your newsletter issues, like positive comments or... or questions that shows people are engaged, that's a great sign that you have it. Another way is that...

And that would be more of an indicator of like if you can do that within three months, for example, that's a great sign you have content market fit. If you're more of a niche B2B publisher, if you can get the 10,000 plus subscribers organically within a year. by posting to discovery platforms and not using paid ads, that's a great sign that you have content market fit, assuming your engagement is like that too. It's really about...

how you grow organically, through word of mouth, through these discovery platforms. It's hard to tell if you have content market fit if you just write a weekly or daily newsletter. and then just spend a bunch of money on ads getting cheap subscribers, that can really push you in the wrong spot and maybe give you a sign that it's working when it's really not. Because then when you go and try and monetize those subscribers later, they just don't buy anything, even though they have 40% open rate.

or a good click-through rate, that doesn't really matter. What matters is, do they buy things? Are they actually engaging with you and having conversations with you and asking you questions and telling you you're helping them through your content?

And do you recommend at what point turning on a paid acquisition channel? Yes. I think there's two points in which you should turn on a paid acquisition channel. And some people don't need it. It's not for everybody.

Because if you want to grow organically forever, that's definitely possible, and many media businesses do that. Reason number one to turn on paid ads is you've monetized your audience and your email list very well. You have kind of a funnel, a process to convert those subscribers into customers.

or to monetize them with advertising and sponsorships in the email newsletter. And you know the ARPU, the average revenue per user, or the subscriber lifetime value of the subscribers. Over 12 months, they're worth... you make $10 from every email subscriber or $30 or more. I've seen some newsletter sign up LTVs be like as high as $600, for example.

That's more in the B2B space, but it's possible. On average, from an organic source like YouTube, we'll make $73, I think, or maybe between $50 and $70 from someone who just signs up for our free newsletter. So if you know that number... and then you go to Facebook and you go to get subscribers for $2 and your LTV is $10, then it's a great investment. But you have to actually monetize and know that number first. Option number two is if you're just someone who wants to learn ads and wants to...

you know, grow a little bit quicker. You could set a hard daily cap that's a very low amount and never go over that until you figure out monetization later. So you set up Facebook ads and you spend 20 bucks a day or 15 bucks a day or 10 bucks a day. And you get anywhere from 10 to 50 subscribers a day from those ads. Gives you some momentum. But you continue to work on your organic growth strategy and your monetization strategy.

And you kind of just have those ads running in the background and you spend a couple hours per week on them or less. It's important that you don't go over that budget until you figure out the things that I just mentioned. or you're going to potentially lose your shirt on advertising. What are the biggest design mistakes you see kill newsletter engagement? And what's the easiest fix someone can implement today? Well, there's, you know, I think a strategy template mistake, which should be...

Your newsletters are just a marketing email for your blog. People want to subscribe to newsletters that give them value in the inbox. So I receive it, I open it, I can read useful stuff, see useful visuals in the email. And without clicking anything, I get value. I become smarter, more informed, whatever the benefit is. And I can close it and move about my day and be happy that I took the time to actually read that. If the newsletter is like 10 different blog posts and a read more link.

And I have to click those. Users don't love it. And we always see very low engagement and very high unsubscribe rate with those types of emails. So that's... Also a strategy thing and a design thing. I think you have to have useful editorial content in the email. Another thing is just like newsletters that are too long.

You know, I'm really trying to keep our emails under 1,500 words total because people feel good when they complete something. And I understand long form content is awesome. Deep dives are awesome. But I think in the newsletter, like people want to get out of their inbox as fast as possible and not most people are not consuming long form content in the inbox. And so I think if you have a format.

That is long form, which I love. I think you should either cap that at like 1,500 words or send people to a blog, a podcast, or a long form YouTube video to deliver that content. It's just a better medium, medium for that, I guess medium for that content. And then the final thing is just keep it simple. You want to have boxes or dividers. So every section will have like a small box around it. And then just give each section kind of a heading of what it is. Like, is this the...

article? Is it the deep dive? Is it the news? Is it the curated section? Is it the outro? That just allows people to easily skim your newsletter and find what they want to read. And really the TLDR is like make it valuable in the inbox and make it legible. Make it easy to read and consume, and you'll be fine.