Speaker 1: Hey guys, so in today's video, I'll be showing you step-by-step how to create a newsletter. These days, newsletters are getting more and more popular. More people are realizing how important it is to have one. And when done right, they can be an amazing way to market your services or even build up a brand new business. And I'll share with you guys my tips and tricks on how to build a successful newsletter. So the first step is that you need to think of a good idea for your newsletter. And this is going to vary depending on who you are, what your passions are, what type of content you want to make, as well as the whole purpose of your newsletter. Is your newsletter to create content as a business itself? Is your newsletter's purpose to get more leads and clients for your other business? Really identify what your newsletter is for and why you're making it. The next thing is that you need to sort of niche this down. I think a big mistake that a lot of people do is they create a newsletter that's very general, very broad. They think the more broad it is, the more people are going to be interested and the bigger I can grow my audience. But that's actually false. You actually want to narrow down what your newsletter talks about to a pretty specific niche. The reason is because you want an audience that has a very specific taste or interest. And if your newsletter is too broad or general, then most people are not going to be inclined to click on it. And that's really going to hurt the growth of your newsletter as well as its performance. People are also way more likely to convert to become subscribers if the content on your newsletter is pretty niche. You'll then want to figure out a way that you guys can actually give value to your audience, right? We want to come up with a scalable way to create content every single day or every week, depending on how often you send out your newsletter. And yeah, that system needs to be able to pump out content without taking up that much of your time, unless this is something that you want to do full time. You also want to set your goals. So is your goal to make money directly from this newsletter? Is it to get more clients for your business? We could easily turn our newsletter into a paid subscription or you can keep it free. Yeah, this is all stuff that you need to think about before you actually start to build your newsletter. The second thing you guys need to do is pick the right email newsletter platform. So there are tons of choices out there. I spent a lot of time doing a ton of research. I used to use Kajabi for my newsletter, but the deliverability of that platform is not that good. It's more of like a generalist platform that does courses, websites, all that stuff. But it's not that good at newsletters by itself. So I spent a lot of time looking and I actually ended up going with Beehive, which is the platform that I'll be showing you guys in this video. The platform that you guys choose is actually super, super important. It's going to determine the features and tools you can have to build your newsletter. I've done a lot of research and this is the one that I sold on for my newsletter. So I'm on this page right now. And if you guys want to learn more about Beehive, you guys can actually scroll through here, see some of the other companies using this platform, look at all their features and more. We can also check out the pricing, you guys. So if you click on this, you can select how many subscribers you have. It's going to recommend a plan. So let's say if you have 10,000, you can go with the growth plan or the scale plan. But if you do have a smaller audience, you guys can actually go with the free launch plan, which is pretty amazing. And so yeah, choose accordingly, depending on your audience size, choose the right plan for you. And even with the growth plan, it comes with a free 14-day trial, plus a bunch of other features that are really, really important. So yeah, this is the one that I recommend. This is the one that I actually use myself. So the first thing we want to do is actually import your subscribers. So if you already have an existing newsletter, then you're going to be able to export those subscribers from whatever platform you were currently using and import those over into Beehive. To do that, you'll click import right here. We'll click start new import, and then we can actually upload a CSV file or we can copy and paste a list of email addresses. So you guys can see from my current plan, I can do up to 15,000 subscribers. And if I do want to get past that, I will need to upgrade my plan. Under settings and under admin, you guys can also play around with the design lab. So every newsletter is probably going to have their own colors and their own style. So what I recommend doing is come here and actually play around with this, change up the borders, change up the spacing. For all the text and all the buttons and all that stuff like that, there's certain things you guys can customize. So this should take maybe about an hour to actually get customized to your liking. After that, you can click on the website tab and we can change all the stuff as well because with Beehive, you can actually create an actual website and that website is sort of connected to your newsletter. So I'm still in the process of creating my own website with Beehive since we just switched over. So I'm actually going to show you guys another newsletter that's absolutely crushing it. They're using Beehive themselves and this is a great example of a very successful newsletter that is growing rapidly. Last time I checked, they had about 30,000 subscribers. Now they have 50,000 and this was just like a few weeks ago. So it's pretty crazy. You guys can check them out at benzbytes.com. And the first thing I'll say is that this is great because it's a very niche newsletter, right? They're basically giving you summaries of what's happening in AI as well as new AI tools. So obviously, a lot of people are very interested in this right now but it's also very specific and niche enough so that the target audience is very specific and that's very good for actually monetizing which we will talk about later. So on their website, they actually have all of their articles and they send out an email five days a week and that article actually gets posted onto their website and anyone can basically come here and read those articles. You don't need to actually sign up for their newsletter. Here they have their call to action so you can enter in your email and subscribe. And yeah, you can sort of look at some of their articles to see how they run their business. It's a very, you know, simple layout and design. It's pretty much just text with different sections, some separators, and a bunch of links. They have some images right here like that and they sectioned out their newsletter pretty well so that it's very easy to read. Yeah, enough of that. You guys will want to make something similar to that. I'm currently working on mine myself. Otherwise, I would show you guys. Let me show you guys what it looks like to actually write a newsletter post on Beehive. So I'm going to click start writing right here and basically, yeah, it looks like this. It's very simple. We can change the title. We can choose whether or not it's going to show the title in the email. We're going to have something for the subtitle as well. We'll select the different authors. So it's going to be me. So that's going to be good. We can also add new guest authors if we want. And down here, we can actually preview this email at any time. We can do a test send, which I always recommend doing. We can save this as a template once we're done with it. And then we can also schedule send it. So we can have this sent at a later predetermined time. Now, in terms of actually creating your email, it's very similar to Notion. I don't know if you guys have used Notion. But when you type in the slash command, it's basically going to open up all these different tools that you guys can use. Okay, so you guys probably want some type of heading first. So let's do a heading one. Let's call this one newsletter number one test article. Press slash to browse again. Let's do a smaller heading down here. And then we can start actually typing out our text. Cool. So after you're done writing text, what we can do is click on that again. We can do a horizontal rule. That's going to section this out a little bit. Let's do another one. And anytime we want, we can add in an image. So let's click on that right here. We can upload an image. So let's say we want to put this picture of this hat. That's going to insert that right here. We can add a caption if you want. This is a hat. Continue on with our news article. You guys can also click on this plus button right here. That's going to open up that as well. I'll show you guys some of the other cool things you guys can do. So we can create a section. So you guys see this red border around this section. And within that section, let's say we want to create a numbered list. So let's say tool number one, tool number two, tool number three. If you ever want to move a section somewhere else, we can easily drag and drop that. So we can drag this here. We can drag that back over here. We can change the formatting as well. So whenever you highlight the text, it brings up this toolbar and you can easily change the text. You can add a link. You can change the formatting and all that stuff. We can also change the font, although I do like this Helvetica font and we can change the color as well. We can also create a button. Obviously, we'll put a link so that if people click on this button, it's going to go there. Another cool feature about Beehive is that we can actually have a referral program. So let me click on this. This is probably something that you're going to want to put at the bottom of your newsletter. This is going to allow people to actually share your newsletter with other people and they can actually earn rewards by building the number of referrals that they get. So super, super cool. A lot of other softwares do not have this. So I do actually recommend doing that, especially if you're starting out and you want to actually promote your newsletter. We can also do a poll. We can have a paywall break, which is pretty cool. If you guys do want to monetize your newsletter, you guys can do that. You guys have recommendations. You guys can put an HTML snippet. We can embed a bunch of different things as well. For example, a YouTube video. Let's paste something there. Let's paste that like that. I'm not going to write out an entire article for you guys, but you guys sort of get the point. You guys see some of the features that Beehive actually gives you. The most important thing, guys, is that the content quality is great and that it offers value to your audience. Otherwise, no one's going to actually open your email and your open rates are going to tank. And yeah, that's just definitely not good. So we can click preview to see what this currently looks like. You guys can see the YouTube video looks like that, which is really great. We can see what it looks like on web as well on the website. We can see what it looks like on mobile. So yeah, just make sure that your email looks good on all these different platforms. There's also some other settings that you guys will need to actually fill out. So we want to have our subject line for the email. You may want some preview text if you want. For the website, you guys can actually edit this. The slug is pretty important, but we're probably going to want to call this something like newsletter one, something just a little bit easier for people to actually see and for search engines to find. You guys can select a thumbnail too if you want. In terms of SEO, we can create a title here as well as a description. And for the delivery, we'll select which audience our email is going out to. We'll select the platform, so web, email, or both. And yeah, we'll basically schedule this sentence. Now I'm going to talk about some of my top tips that I have for you guys. The first is that your subject lines need to be very, very nicely curated and designed. The subject lines, it's like the title of the email. That's sort of like a thumbnail. So if you watch YouTube, you know just how important thumbnails are. This is what's going to grab the attention of your viewers. And if people read something that sounds super boring, they're not going to click on your email and no one's going to open that email. The deliverability is going to worsen. And yeah, it's just not good for a newsletter. So definitely spend a good amount of time coming up with a good subject line because that's really going to impact the performance of that particular sentence. Next is for the actual copy itself. It's really important that you guys have good research and good writers. I know a lot of you guys might be tempted to just plug a few commands into chatGBT, copy that and paste it and send it out to your audience. While this can be okay, maybe short-term, that type of content is not going to be good enough to entice your viewers to want to open up all your emails. And so if you want a really, really successful email, you really want to make sure that the content is good. You're going to want to do a lot of research. You're going to want to have a good writer. It can either be yourself or someone that you hire. Just make sure that the actual content itself is really good because that's the whole point of your newsletter. It's all just text. Next is you definitely want to have a strong call to action. So a lot of newsletters, they have a lot of text, but they don't have any actual actions that they want the reader to actually do. So whether that's to click on a link, to share with a friend, to actually respond to the email, make sure you have something that encourages the viewer or the reader to actually take some type of action. And the last thing is you definitely do want to have an email template. All your emails, they should look relatively similar. They should have a similar design. And the same thing goes for your subject lines. Make sure that your subject lines all have a similar style so that it's pretty easily recognizable. Another tip is, of course, an email newsletter, it takes a long time to build. And if you guys don't stick with it for a long time, then I pretty much guarantee you, it's not going to do that well. It's going to grow slowly at first, but you really do need to stick with this for a long time. Tell yourself to create consistent emails for at least six to 12 months. If you still don't see progress then, then maybe you can switch things up, change your niche. But yeah, it does take a long time. And then in terms of actual marketing, getting your newsletter out so that people actually subscribe. This is probably one of the hardest points because everyone can create a pretty good newsletter with good content, but not everyone can get their newsletter to be well-known. And today, the fastest way of growing your newsletter is definitely just going to be through social media. For example, Ben's Bites, they grew the bulk of their subscribers through Twitter. So Ben is very active on Twitter. He posts a lot of value to his audience on Twitter about AI tools and stuff like that. And in a lot of his posts, he has a call to action to get them to actually subscribe to his newsletter. So that's really why he's able to grow so fast is because he has that external audience that he can do call to actions to. And bring that audience over here to his newsletter. Once you get people over to your newsletter, it's really your game. It's really your platform. You own it. You can do whatever you want with your audience. You can sell to them. You can continue providing a lot of good value. But the great thing is that no one else owns that data. It's your data. So yeah, that's basically how you start a newsletter today. I hope this was a pretty good overview of the whole newsletter process and how you guys can build a newsletter from the ground up. Feel free to use my link down below to Beehive. Having a good email platform like that is definitely going to increase your chances of becoming successful with your newsletter. And yeah, again, thank you so much for your time. If you guys enjoyed the video, make sure to hit that like button and also subscribe for more content just like this. This whole channel is dedicated at giving you guys free guides and tutorials helping you to start your business. Thanks so much for your time and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.