Hi Everyone - My apologies for this being a day late. I wanted to include my observations from New Media Summit from yesterday. Overall, it was a great experience and we met some incredible people!

This week:

This week we added 159 subscribers, up 3 from last week. Our meta ads are starting to creep up a little bit regardless of the tests that we run. This is inevitable, but I’m still excited about trying a few different new creative types. Warren and I are going to record some content of ourselves on camera for the ads and see if they convert.

The lead magnet was launched successfully. We have seen our open rate and our click through rate on our welcome email slowly creep up. It’s not easy to see the data, but it looks like it is up about 3% from before which is significant.

I also successfully created the affiliate accounts to create a page. Not super sure how we implement this, but excited to experiment with it.

Warren and I attended New Media Summit the last two days. It was an awesome experience! For those who are unfamiliar, it is probably the biggest and most informative conference for newsletter creators.

These were my biggest takeaways:

1) Networking is the #1 priority - I believe individual relationships are what open the most doors. We spent 50% of our time in the sessions and the other 50% meeting people. In this conference (like many), the sessions are recorded and you can watch them later. We prioritized meeting people in person because that is what is irreplaceable in a setting like this. Also, most of the information is already in a newsletter or a youtube video somewhere.

We met some awesome people locally that we are excited to collaborate with!

2) Monetization is the Differentiator, not distribution - This was a paradigm shift for me. I’ve been spending a ton of time trying to reduce the cost of acquiring new subscribers. While this is fine, you run into diminishing marginal returns fast. There is also only so cheap you can get leads for at a certain point.

The other end of the equation, monetization, is the opposite. There is actually unlimited upside in the amount of money (in exchange for value) that you can get from your audience. The real art is in getting great at monetizing, even more so than reducing costs.

3) There is a clear trend towards local - It seems like trends are cyclical. There was a huge amount of talk and interest in local media. I think this is directly aligned with what I’m seeing. AI makes global hard, local is where you can carve out your niche.

4) The thank you page is hyper underutilized - Matt Paulson, the founder of MarketBeat, said that the time when subscribers are most engaged is when they first sign up for your newsletter. This is apparently the #1 time to offer them something. We are working on integrating this ASAP.

5) There are levels to this - I really thought Warren and I were pretty cutting edge in our work on this. I had a bit of hubris that because we had technical backgrounds and experience with data that we had an edge. I was wrong; there is so much to learn. This is an extremely exciting space to be in.

I got a ton of inspiration for meta ads from the conference this past week. I’m going to experiment with some image ads again. I’m also going to experiment with some ads where I am on camera and I tell the story of AFF a bit.

I’m also going to experiment with sending our subscribers to our landing page rather than having them fill out the form. This will allow us to maximize our thank you page traffic.

You can find the ads here if you’re interested.

This week we are focusing on: