The Underrated Growth Strategy That Beats Paid Ads (Better quality subscribers)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Growth In Reverse — The Underrated Growth Strategy That Beats Paid Ads (Better Quality Subscribers)
Date: March 4, 2026
Hosts: Chenell Basilio and Dylan Redekop

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Episode Theme & Purpose

This episode of Growth In Reverse dives into the underrated — yet highly effective — strategy of cross-promotion and collaboration as a route to acquiring higher quality newsletter subscribers, often more effectively than paid ads. Chenell and Dylan break down multiple real-world examples, sharing actionable tactics for leveraging partnerships, guest posts, webinars, and event series. They highlight why these strategies provide long-term benefits by building relationships, repurposing content, and reaching new audiences with authenticity and impact.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Guest Posts and Borrowed Audiences

• Case: Chiler Demiralp (Substack Newsletter, Guest Posts) [01:06 - 04:44]

  • Chiler wrote six guest posts targeted at overlapping or adjacent audiences and gained 700 organic subscribers.
    • “It's about 120 new subscribers per guest post...not too shabby at all for just writing six posts.” — Dylan [02:44]
  • Key moves:
    • Repurposed existing content/data for new audiences (no need to start from scratch).
    • Gained not just subscribers, but potential long-term collaborators and partners.
    • Highlights the intangibles: authority, visibility, and future opportunities beyond simple subscriber numbers.
  • Importance of establishing authentic collaborations, not just chasing vanity metrics.
    • “You might see a hundred subscribers from a post and think that's not worth it. But you're missing out on the long-term benefit...which is building those relationships.” — Chenell [03:10]

• Importance of Platform Recommendations [05:11]

  • Use Substack or Beehive built-in recommendations for extra subscriber gains when doing guest content.

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2. Audience Access Trades & Co-Branded Educational Content

• Case: Avi Gandhi & Creator Logic (Audience Access Trades) [05:49 - 09:50]

  • Avi formed partnerships with brands (like Skillshare) to create joint content (webinars, blog posts), then obtained access to their audiences in return (e.g., the RSVP list from a co-hosted Skillshare webinar led to ~500 subscribers alone).
    • “He was able to say, ‘Hey, I'm Avi. I run the Creator Logic newsletter’...Skillshare then promoted the event and gave Avi the RSVP list.” — Chenell [07:01]
  • True partnerships, not pure sponsorships: creating win-win swaps where both parties gain visibility and value.
  • Encouraged listeners to actively seek out tools and platforms their ideal readers already use as potential partners.

• Case: Caitlin Burgoyne & SparkToro Webinar [08:16 - 09:07]

  • Hosting educational webinars with brands (now living on YouTube as evergreen content) to leverage the brand’s audience and legacy traffic.
    • “That is a sustaining video that anyone in the future could find...and she's just building off the brand equity of SparkToro.” — Chenell [08:58]

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3. Virtual Speaking Circuit & Content Series Collaborations

• Case: Amy Nelson & The Riveter (Speaking Circuit) [09:50 - 11:38]

  • Hosted virtual event series in collaboration with creators/brands, leveraging shared promotion and attendee lists.
    • “She essentially said, hey, do you want to...put on this three part series...Invite my whole audience; would love for you to invite your whole audience, as well.” — Chenell [10:11]
  • Results: ~1,100 subscribers from a single event.
  • Layering in attendee freebies specific to the event topic as conversion incentives.

• Strategy: Repurposing Event Content [13:55 - 15:25]

  • Maximize ROI of collaborative events/content by slicing into blog posts, newsletter segments, and social media.
    • “You can repurpose it and use it for, depending on how much juice you can squeeze out of it, for weeks if not months afterwards.” — Dylan [14:13]
  • Make post-collab promotion easy for partners: package social/email assets so they’re frictionless to share.

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4. Trusted Referral Flywheel & Systematized Cross-Promos

• Case: Amanda Goetz (Newsletter, Trusted Referral Flywheel) [18:01 - 21:53]
  • Used upfront paid ads (via Sparkloop/Facebook) to build list size, then systematically pursued recurring cross-promos with other newsletters.
  • Formalized cross-promo slots in the regular sponsor section, focusing on relationships over short-term revenue.
    • “She was like, no, I'm going to take these and put them even in my sponsor spot in the newsletter...Let’s do it again in six months.” — Chenell [20:09]
  • Use tools like Kit’s Creator Network or Substack/ Beehiive databases to find aligned partners.
  • Keep a spreadsheet for outreach and scheduling to run ongoing swaps with best-performing collaborators.

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5. Meta-Example: The “30 Days of Growth” Pop-Up Newsletter [22:45 - 26:59]

• Chenell’s Experiment: A 30-Day Sprint of Collaborations
  • Ran a new pop-up newsletter featuring 30 cross-promos with 29 different creators (one per day).
  • Result: 3,700 signups, ~1,700 new to Chenell’s main list.
  • Key takeaways:
    • “The quality of those subscribers was off the charts. I can't even tell you the number of CEOs at large companies that came up to me and were like, ‘This was awesome.’” — Chenell [25:14]
    • It felt like an ‘event’, generating urgency and excitement (scarcity effect for a time-bound newsletter).
    • Generated lasting “relationship capital” and a content vault to re-use over time.
  • Incentivized referrals and built in giveaways to accelerate sharing.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Borrowed Audiences:
  “If you can find the right audiences to write guest posts for, that's where the gold lies.” — Chenell [03:10]

• On Collaboration Value:
  “We can’t just look at this from a vanity metric of, ‘Oh, I got X amount of subscribers, so it was or wasn’t worth doing.’ A lot of the times, there’s a payout that’s unseen, that you can’t see.” — Dylan [03:47]

• On Making Collaborations Frictionless:
  “If you fabricate a post — almost like a placeholder or a boilerplate text for them to share — they're going to be that much more likely to share it.” — Dylan [16:23]

• On Systemizing Partner Swaps:
  “Make a system out of this. Figure out how often you want to do these. Create a Dream 100 type list...Just start reaching out and see if you can't book yourself solid with these things.” — Chenell [21:53]

• On Pop-Up Newsletters:
  “This strategy of let's create this new asset that you could essentially create a marketable event around...for 30 days you'll get these tips. People want to get in on that, especially if it's free.” — Chenell [26:13]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro to Topic & Why Quality > Quantity Of Subs: [00:00 - 01:06]
• Guest Post Strategy (Chiler Demiralp): [01:06 - 04:44]
• Platform Recommendations (Substack/Kit/Beehiive): [05:11 - 05:45]
• Audience Access Trade (Avi Gandhi, Skillshare, Caitlin Burgoyne): [05:49 - 09:50]
• Virtual Events & Speaking Circuits (Amy Nelson): [09:50 - 11:38]
• Repurposing Collaborations & Event Content: [13:55 - 15:25]
• Trusted Referral Flywheel (Amanda Getz): [18:01 - 21:53]
• Systemization & Recurring Partnerships: [21:53 - 22:42]
• Meta-Case: 30 Days of Growth Pop-Up Newsletter: [22:45 - 26:59]
• Final Takeaways & Encouragement: [27:26 - 27:54]

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Actionable Takeaways

• Seek out adjacent or overlapping audiences for guest posts and swaps — quality is more important than mass reach.
• Go beyond just swaps: webinars, workshops, and pop-up newsletters “event-ize” your collaborations and deepen engagement.
• Build systems: track your partners, schedule promotions, and cultivate relationships for future swaps.
• Repurpose everything — content from collaborations multiplies your reach and justifies the up-front effort.
• Don’t underestimate the long-term intangible benefits: authority, trust, and new opportunities compound.
• Make it easy for partners to share — remove all friction and create shareable assets for them.

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Bottom Line:
Cross-promotion and content-driven collaborations bring in engaged, loyal subscribers — and open doors to relationships and repurposable assets that paid ads simply can’t match. The best newsletter growth isn’t always the fastest; it’s the smartest—and most collaborative.

Transcript

[A]

The quality of those subscribers was off the charts. Everyone always talks about, like, wanting to be everywhere. This is one of those strategies that really does help you move towards that.

[B]

There's not really any excuse to not be able to do this. You have all of the information right in front of you.

[A]

He said that particular one led to almost 500 subscribers by itself. You're just like ensuring that both parties get like a win, win situation from this.

[B]

It's not just like this one time thing. You can repurpose it, use it for weeks, if not months afterwards.

[A]

She did that a ton. And she was getting subscribers from this, like hundreds each time. It work super well. I think at the time it was like 3,700 people signed up for it. Today we're going to share some strategies that we've actually never covered on the podcast before, but have been covered in the newsletter and elsewhere. And so we decided why not just share them here for you?

[B]

Yeah, some of these are our favorite growth strategies because not because they're like really quick hacks, but because if you invest a little bit of time and effort into these, they can really work really well for you.

[A]

Yeah, totally. Like thousands of subscribers. So we wanted to share them today, walk through, and give you some ideas to mull over in the next couple weeks.

[B]

So Chanel and I both pulled up some past strategies and the first one I pulled up was Chiler Demiralp. And forgive me if I'm mispronouncing your name, but Shyla runs a substack newsletter and she uses basically a guest post type strategy. So this isn't anything necessarily brand new revolutionary, but she really did a good job of finding other people's audiences to basically tailor like a guest post to that is going to have some audience overlap or at least some adjacent complimentary audiences so that she can write a guest post. And then the person that she's writing the guest post for will feature obviously her article and then share a link back to her newsletter. So I thought this was, again, it's not something that people probably have never heard before, but it's something that she concentrated on for. I think she did six guest posts and she got 700 subscribers from it. So in this day and age, 700 organic subscribers, in my opinion, is not too shabby at all for just writing six posts.

[A]

Totally. And one of the benefits of this is, like, if the person you're writing the guest post for is okay with it, you probably could rerun that article on your own newsletter and just kind of like drive them to their website. So you're, you're removing the need for yourself to create content for those six posts as well. And you're still getting more subscribers and visibility and people learning about who you are. So I thought this was kind of cool. I like this one because typically when you hear someone talk about a guest post strategy, they're like, I've got thousands and thousands of subscribers. Whereas I think that's probably not the norm for most people.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so for someone to come out and say, hey, I wrote six posts, got 700 subscribers, I'm like, that's pretty good. I think that's a decent amount of subscribers.

[B]

So she's. Yeah, it's about 120 new subscribers per guest post. And the interesting thing here too is she was repurposing content and some data that she already had collected. So it wasn't like she was coming at these guest posts completely from scratch. She was able to take information she already had some posts she'd already written and repurpose them for these audiences. So it wasn't like starting from a blank slate, which can be a little daunting for some people. So I thought that was a smart way to approach it too.

[A]

I like this. And she said she actually got some longer term subscribers and even partners from this that she was able to like, work on other projects with. So I think one of the biggest pieces of any collaboration that you're doing with other creators is just let me get this person knowing who I am and we can collaborate on other things in the future. Yeah, you might see a hundred subscribers from a post and think that's not worth it. But you're missing out on like the long term benefit of this, which is like building those relationships. You never know who's reading. A hundred subscribers is not always the same. Like, some of the quality of these people could be really high. I think if you can find the right audiences to write guest posts for, that's where like the gold lies.

[B]

Absolutely. And you've covered other people who have done this. We've talked a lot about Maya Voye who has done this with somebody we've had on the podcast, Akash Gupta, among many others. So it's working for them. They just, you just need to. Again, you put the time and effort into writing the pieces and doing the outreach and this is more than likely going to pay off. And I think the last thing that you just mentioned about building relationships is we can't just look at it this from a vanity metric of, oh, I got X amount of subscribers. So it was or wasn't worth doing. A lot of the times there's a payout that's unseen, that it's not super tangible, that you can't see. So that is building these relationships with people. So I think it's a, it's more of a long term play than anything than just a quick subscriber growth strategy. But it does work that way too.

[A]

Yeah. And one last thing, and then we can move on to the next one. But I think everyone always talks about like wanting to be everywhere and I think this is one of those strategies that really does help you move towards that. Because if one of your subscribers sees you on another post or another newsletter that they read, or maybe even two, if you're doing multiple guest posts, like that could be big. And that just solidifies your authority in their mind. So yeah, there's so many hidden benefits to this. And so I just really want to harp home that like you don't have to just focus on like the subscriber you got from that one thing. It's like there's such a web of hidden collaborations that might come in the future from those things. Yeah, I think it's worth it.

[B]

And here's one other thing that as you're saying that that made me think is she's on Substack and Substack has a built in recommendations feature, as does Kit Beehive. So when you're reaching out to these creators and you're creating content for them with, for these guest posts, obviously you should, I think, do yourself some due diligence and ask, hey, would you mind recommending me in your signup process? So that alone can be worth the outreach alone, especially if it's somebody who's driving a lot of subscribers every day, that it could be potentially being recommended to your newsletter as well.

[A]

Yeah, I like it.

[B]

Cool, cool.

[A]

Do we want to move on to the next one?

[B]

I'm nodding. Yes.

[A]

Oh, I like it. Okay. The next one is from my friend Avi Gandhi, and he runs a newsletter called Creator Logic. And he used what I called at the time, the audience access trade. And so he was able to get around 10,769 subscribers from these partnerships that he was running. So this was super interesting. And he essentially was trading content with these brands, these partnerships to gain access to their audience instead of just like paying money and like trying to sponsor those brands.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Does that make sense?

[B]

Yeah. So he was like writing again. This is another type of guest post thing CJ Gustafson has done this as well, although he was charging for his content, but essentially he was writing guest posts and saying, hey, feature my content in your newsletter. And I'm assuming. Correct me if I'm wrong, Chanel, but I'm assuming that these guest posts probably spoke nicely about the tool or the SaaS platform or whatever it might have been that he was writing about, was probably talking about how it benefits him or his audience or solves a problem that his readers might have.

[A]

Yeah, thanks for saying that, because I clearly missed a big piece of context, which was that these weren't always just guest posts. Like, he actually did a webinar with skillshare.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And so he interviewed one of their creators, so he's helping them build content, but he's also getting this huge spotlight on him, and he's able to say, hey, I'm Avi. I run the creator Logic newsletter. Skillshare then promoted the event and let Avi, like, they gave Avi the RSVP list. So he was essentially able to just upload that into a subscriber list and be like, hey, if you want to stay on the newsletter, click here. And he said that particular one led to almost 500 subscribers by itself.

[B]

Yeah, so.

[A]

So that's pretty cool.

[B]

Yeah, that. That is really cool. And if you do a little bit of digging, you'd be able to figure out the tools and platforms that your subscribers, your readers, are using or that maybe your target reader might be using. So I think this is a pretty accessible strategy for a lot of people. It just, again, it takes a little bit of effort to do the. Do a little bit of digging, find these platforms, and then doing the outreach. Once you get there and you create the content, you have a joint webinar or workshop or even, like, an interview, which isn't. Isn't a huge, heavy lift to do an interview with somebody. It's probably a lot less of a lift than doing a workshop. Right. You have to prep, obviously, for the interview, but aside from that, going live, interviewing one of, like, skillshare's creators probably wasn't a ton of work for Avi, and yet he was able to access their audience, too. And that skillshare's got a pretty sizable audience.

[A]

Yeah, and I'm just thinking about this in another term. Like, I remember Caitlin Burgoyne did this with some brands. So for context, Caitlin runs a newsletter called why We Buy, and she helps people learn the science behind buyer psychology and, like, why people actually buy what they buy. And so her whole thing is, like, marketing psychology and so she would go out to companies like SparkToro, which is a marketing software to help you like find where your customers are hanging out. And she did a webinar for their customer base. And so that now lives on YouTube. And so that is a sustaining video that anyone in the future could find. And it's essentially Caitlin teaching her whole ethos behind how she thinks about this stuff. And she's just like building off of the brand equity of SparkToro and their YouTube list. So I think that's a super smart implementation of this too.

[B]

Yeah, anytime you can get like an evergreen piece of content on something like YouTube, it's not gonna. That's not gonna hurt. That's not gonna hurt for sure. So that, that is an interesting strategy too. Might have to dive deeper into that one. I like that one thing too. With Avi is his biggest actual swap was with a company called Influencers, where he's got over, I think 10,000 subscribers in exchange for basically he was promoting their platform on LinkedIn and I'm assuming as well on his newsletter. And in return they were sharing his newsletter and his content as well. So it's, I don't know tons of details about this one, but that's nothing. I guess it's pretty sizable. Exactly.

[A]

Another one, Amy Nelson from the Riveter, who she actually did something kind of similar, which was like, I don't want to like travel to all these public speaking events, but I will do these virtual series essentially with partners. And so she did this and it was called like the speaking circuit strategy. And she would partner with like brands or creators that had an audience that she wanted to get in front of.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And she essentially said, hey, do you want to. I'm going to put on this three part series. I'm going to invite my whole audience. Would love for you to invite your whole audience as well. And they went at it together. But she did the legwork of like setting it up, helping promote it and then you're just like ensuring that both parties get like a win win situation from this. And she said she did that a ton and she was getting subscribers from this, like hundreds each time. And so that's also interesting too if you can like find a content series that you could collaborate with a brand or creator on.

[B]

Yeah, it looks like she's got almost 1100 subscribers just from one of those events, so.

[A]

Oh yeah, Nice.

[B]

Yeah, that's pretty sweet. Again, it's going to depend on the size of the audience that's of the people you're partnering with or the company that you're partnering with. But these are again, great examples of borrowing other people's audiences essentially is this whole big takeaway. Right. You have your own audience and followers you're building online on LinkedIn, on Instagram, Twitter, wherever. But tapping into somebody else's is just, it's not just like a 2x gain. It can be a whole lot more than that. So I really like the strategy too.

[A]

Yeah, it's funny that, like, these three examples are essentially the same thing, just done slightly differently.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Like you're still partnering with other people. Maybe you're writing the one, maybe you're doing an interview or maybe you're doing like a content series. But at the end of the day, like they're all just, hey, let's come together, let's work on the same project and we'll promote it for each to each other's audiences. And yeah, I like it. I like these.

[B]

Yeah. And one other thing that she did here that, that you've noted is they offered like event specific freebies that tied directly to the, the topic that they were talking about. So that could be even just alone, a great, like, carrot to dangle in front of your audience when you're promoting this, this specific event just to get people to show up. And what's your feeling? Chanel on replays or recordings of these events and giving them out. I know some people are like, no, you have to be there if you want the replay. You have to show up. Or, or you just have to sign up to get the replay. What's your feeling on that? Hey, Dylan, here. You know what sucks? When your newsletter plateaus and growth completely stalls out. It happened to me last year, but instead of panicking or worry, hopped into Chanel's Growth Vault. The Growth Vault has over 30 tactics and lessons on getting more subscribers and keeping them subscribed and engaged. I pulled out a few new strategies and implemented them that very day. The best part is these strategies are super tactical and they even come with video walkthroughs from Chanel. Oh, and the Growth Vault is constantly growing. Whenever Chanel finds a new proven strategy, she adds it and you get instant access. And for a limited time, the Growth Vault even includes chanel's subscriber onboarding course, 10 lessons and a few extra tips and tricks to make sure the subscribers you work so hard to get actually stick around. Check it all out in the Growth Vault at growth in reverse.com vault.

[A]

Yeah, I go back and forth like the marketer in me is, yeah, you should get as many people as possible to show up live. But the realist in me is people are busy, there's stuff happening, there's stuff going on. I am one of those people who loves watching replays because I want to listen on 2x speed. Literally because I just, I can't concentrate unless it's like moving faster than normal, average speed. I love watching replays for that. But I'm also the person who like out of every 10 replays I might watch two.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So there is something about getting people to show up live to actually consume the content. But yeah, I don't think you should like completely gatekeep a replay. But if you can set like a bonus for someone to show up live or something like that and then still offer the replay, I think that's a good, I don't know, middle ground, if you will.

[B]

That's where you could do the specific these freebies is if you show up, you get them. If you don't, you get the replay but you won't get the, you won't get the lead magnet or whatever the person is offering at for attendees.

[A]

Yeah, I like that.

[B]

The other thing she does is she repurposed the content for from the event to her newsletters and social media. So it's not just hey, we did this thing. If you showed up, great, here's the replay. If you didn't. Oh also I have content now to write in my newsletter. Here are some of the big takeaways, here's what we promoted, here's some information we shared. Here are some of the people who came and showed up. Here were some of the things that they learned or the unlocks. They had some social proof. Right. And then you can share that again in your newsletter and on social media. So it's not just like this one time thing. You can repurpose it and use it for depending on how much juice you can squeeze out of it for weeks, if not months afterwards.

[A]

Yeah, and I think this is one of the things a lot of creators and just content creators, people in general do poorly, myself included, is like you spend so much time setting this thing up like you should be turning that into like two different blog posts, multiple video clips like, like taking this and turning it into so many more pieces of content. Because the best pieces of content, the best series, the best types of these things do well when you put more energy into them. And you can only do that if you're getting the, the back end like the sawdust, if you will, on the back end. So that you can spend that time next time as well. You don't have to think about content for tomorrow. It's like, have a whole week, two weeks worth of content that I could keep pumping out about this thing because there were so many different angles to it. Maybe we talked about this one specific thing you could go deeper on. And so I think content creators in general can just benefit from repurposing their stuff and, like, slicing and dicing it differently.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So, yeah, I love that she's redoing that.

[B]

Yeah. Especially if it's not a paywalled piece of content that you're charging people for. Obviously you want to be careful with that, but when it's like a free thing that anybody can sign up for and come to and you've got permission also from the people that you're collaborating with to reshare it, then, yeah, I think that's. It's probably something that a lot of people don't take advantage of that they really could. Anything else from Amy's here?

[A]

Well, I think because she's collaborating with these other brands, these other creators, like, make content that they could also reshare after the fact because then they're still going to be, like, promoting it to their audience instead of they sent one email with one link to sign up for this thing. It's no, hey, last week we did this thing. If you want to get the replay, go sign up here. And then you're still promoting it after the fact. Give your other people content to repurpose. I love when I go on podcasts and people clip up the things for me, and I could throw it on Instagram. I'm a horrible Instagrammer, but if you give me something that looks good, I will 100% post it.

[B]

Oh, man, I'm so glad you said that, because I was just about to say this doesn't have to just be for, like, workshops, webinars, digital events. This can be for a podcast episode that you're interviewing somebody on or that they're interviewing you or where there's two people. An example of this is we had somebody on our podcast recently, and we send out emails when we let them know that the podcast is going live so that they can share it. And if you just say, hey, it'd be great if you shared it. That's. That's a bit of friction. Right. Then they have to like, okay, get the link, write up a post. But if you fabricate a post almost like a placeholder or a boilerplate text for them to share, they're going to be that much more likely to share it. So it's kind of sort of what you're saying is like, instead of maybe clipping part of the episode you're sharing, like, here's what you can literally copy and paste and put in your post with the link to the episode. So you're just giving them. Actually, we talk, we're going to talk about this strategy with a different creator who did this later on that's not in this episode, that's going to be probably in an upcoming episode just to tease some future content, but somebody who's doing this really well with their newsletter, making it super frictionless for other people to share. So I just think thank you for calling that out because that reminded me of me taking these extra small steps that just highly increase the chances of your collaborators sharing the content.

[A]

Yeah. And like, you think about it, you go on a podcast, you probably 100% of the time forget most of what you said. And so it's not only are they saying, hey, it's live, go share it. I have to now go back and listen to it, remember what the highlights were, and then pull that out for myself. Like, I'm, I'm lazy. I'm not going to do it. So if somebody does it for me, like, I will 100% post those.

[B]

Yeah, I'd argue you're not lazy. You just don't have time to siphon through it all.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. Nice. Okay, Chanel, we've talked a lot about different ways to basically cross promote, collaborate with people. I think we have one more to get to, but then I want you to think about what your best collaboration is. So we'll get to that at the end of this episode. But what, like, basically think through, like, what collaboration have you done that has kind of been the most fruitful for you? So think about that. Why don't we talk about Amanda Getz? So she is. She's a content creator. She's been like the CMO at some pretty big companies. She's started and sold a couple companies as well. So she's got a lot of experience in the content creation space. She started up a newsletter a few years ago, and she uses something called the Trusted Referral Flywheel. And she says, she told us or she told you about this? And she said it's like, it's better than paid ads, essentially. Now, the interesting thing that I found about this is she kind of actually leveraged. She had a bit of capital and she Invested upfront in some paid growth. I think she was using Sparkloop, potentially some Facebook ads to grow her newsletter to start. And once she kind of reached a little bit of a critical mass with her newsletter, then yes, it's a vanity metric, but people will care about these list sizes. When you're dangling that carrot of hey, you want to collaborate with me? I have 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 subscribers. And then all of a sudden you're like, maybe more willing to listen to what that collaboration might be. So I feel like she took this kind of backwards approach of growing the list first and then once she's got this relatively sizable list, then reaching out to people and collaborating with them.

[A]

Yeah. And from someone who's been doing this while I looked at this and I was like, oh, it just cross promotions with a system behind it, like super smart. She essentially will go out and try and book these cross promotions consistently. So the average creator is like, oh, maybe I should collaborate with this person this month. And then three months go by and they forget about this. She was like, no, no, I'm going to take these and put them even in my sponsor spot in the newsletter. She's like, I don't need to make money from that. So let me ahead and promote this other newsletter. Hopefully they do the same on their end and we'll collaborate and send each other subscribers. And I think the intention behind this is very. I like it a lot.

[B]

Yeah. So intentionally having a couple cross promotion partners per month, it looks like she was also leveraging Kit's creator network again. Substack Beehive. They all have these built in networks now where you can find different people to potentially reach out to and collaborate with based on topics, niches, interests, that kind of thing. So these platforms have democratized like search and database. Right. Like we've. They've made it so much easier to find these newsletters to collaborate with. So there's not really any excuse in my opinion, to not be able to do this. You have all of the information right in front of you. If you spend a few minutes and you reach out or spend a few minutes in research, you'd be able to find people to reach out to.

[A]

Yeah. And the beautiful thing about this is like you can go back to partners that you collaborated with where it worked out super well and do it again in six months and you don't have to just do it once and be done. Like I've had a few cross promotions that I've done, for example, with Kieran Drew, and it's like, hey, we're both getting really good value from this. Let's do it again in six months. I'll see you in a few months and we'll rehash this thing. So I think people look at a lot of this stuff as like a one off, one time thing, when in fact you can actually go back and rerun the same playbook.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

Still working.

[B]

Absolutely. And it doesn't have to be just like, hey, promote my newsletter and I'll promote yours. Maybe you've got a new resource, a new lead magnet quiz database, whatever it might be. If you need more ideas on lead magnets, we've just published an episode about lead magnets, so go back and listen to that one. But maybe you have one of those and it's six months down the road and you come back to the person say, hey, I've got this new great resource. Want to do resource swap now instead of just like a straight up newsletter swap. So I think that could be really fruitful as well. If it's a, again the caveat of it being a good resource and a good partner, then that should work out quite well.

[A]

Yeah, I like this one. So essentially the behind the scenes thing is just make a system out of this. Figure out how often you want to do these. Create a Dream 100 type list where you're writing down a list of all the people you'd love to collaborate with and just start reaching out and see if you can't book yourself solid with these things.

[B]

Yep. And maybe it goes without saying, but I'm saying it anyway. Use even a basic spreadsheet just to keep these organized so that you know who you're reaching out to and who you're promoting and when. I know when I was starting up my newsletter I was like just making maybe mental notes or just small notes and eventually got to the point where, oh no, I need to like really slot, slot these in and have a proper system of when I'm either going to do run a paid ad or a sponsored spot or sorry, a cross promotion spot too so that it wouldn't all of a sudden I'd miss it and that sucks. Very important to keep track.

[A]

I like it.

[B]

Yeah. Okay. So did you think about my question?

[A]

I did. I mean, I think the most obvious one was just the 30 days of growth. So for those who don't know, I in the growth reverse pro community I was planning to do, we were doing like a 30 day sprint of doing more cross promotions which we were just talking about and I was like you know what? Like, people keep telling me they get like four subscribers. Like, they're not working super well. They don't know how to, you know, do outreach. And so I was like, what if I got more data around this? And I was like, what if I did a 30 day pop up daily newsletter where I did 30 cross promotions with 30 different creators? And like, of course that sounds insane, but my brain sprung into action. I was like, I bought this domain 30 days of growth co. And I was like, let's go. I just started doing outreach and got 30, 29 different creators to partner with me on this. And I essentially just, I wrote the pieces for them. Like, I wasn't asking them to come up with a full piece of content, but I was like, hey, give me an idea of something you use to grow your list and we'll go ahead and share that to this list. If you can just promote 30 days of growth one time in a newsletter. Yeah. And it worked super well. We ended up with like, I think at the time it was like 3700 people signed up for it, around 1700. Some were new subscribers to my list. So I think that was 100% worth it in my book. And now I have a bunch of content I could just keep resharing.

[B]

Kind of like we just did 30 days of growth.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. I know, yeah, these did come from that.

[B]

All of, all of these, all of these case studies or examples we just shared were all previous 30 days of growth case studies. So I think it's full meta here. Like, we were sharing 30 days growth from a cross promotion that you did where we were talking about cross promotions in this episode. So, yes, definitely meta. But yeah, you just. I think it's. I'm glad that you mentioned 30 days growth because funny enough, I hadn't even really. I thought you might talk about something, a different collaboration that like, went really well. You did refer to Kieran Drew as somebody who you partnered with at one point. But I think 30 days of growth for the juice and the squeeze you got out of it was definitely worth it because now you had this list of people that you've collaborated with. So you've built these relationships, you've shared their content, you've helped your readers, you provide a value for free. You didn't charge people for this, you just gated the content. So you had to subscribe to actually read it. And now you have this backlog of content that you can reshare a year later like you are right now. So I think it was really Smart.

[A]

And going back to what we were talking about with Chiler's thing, like, yes, you could say 1700 new subscribers was not worth the effort. And the daily slog of collaborating with 30 people is hard. I'm just going to tell you it's not easy. However, the quality of those subscribers was off the charts. Like, I can't even tell you the number of CEOs at large companies that came up to me and were like, this was awesome. And I was like, I didn't even know you were reading it. This is so weird. And like it gave me a little bit of imposter syndrome. But also it's just the amount of. Because it turned it into an event. Right? It wasn't just, hey, subscribe to my newsletter. No, this is a time based thing. Like for 30 days you'll get these tips and then they might live somewhere else. But for now this is happening this time to this time. And so people want to get in on that, especially if it's free. So I think it's just, I really think this is an underutilized strategy and I hope to talk more about this in the future. But yeah, that's for another episode.

[B]

And when you say this is an underutilized strategy, are you referring to the pop up newsletter itself?

[A]

Yeah, totally. And it doesn't have to be like a 30 day thing. It doesn't have to be like a daily newsletter, although I do think there is something about that. But yeah, I think this strategy of let's create this new asset that you could essentially create a marketable event around. So for mine it was like, there's this 30 day time period. You're gonna get 30 strategies for free. Sign up, share it with friends if you like. And yeah, so I think there is something about that format that does really well.

[B]

Yep. And you incentivized one. I know we're going a little bit into the weeds here, but it's important to note, like you created like a giveaway for this. You incentivized referrals with free access to private podcast if you were just one person. There was a lot of really smart things you did with this and again, it proved out to work quite well. So are you gonna do three days of growth again, do you think?

[A]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, A hundred percent.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

I have to. It's like every time I talk to people, like, somehow this comes up in probably one out of every three conversations I have. And I'm like, okay, fine, I'll do it again.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

It's so much work, but I'm gonna do it. And this time I'll probably record a bunch of videos as I'm starting to do outreach just so I can help people. See. Hey, it's a lot of work, but there's a formula behind it and you can follow the same thing and then

[B]

you can add those to the Growth Vault.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

Yeah, that's it. There you go. Okay, cool. So we've covered a lot of ground in just the last 30 minutes. A quick recap, Cross promotions, collabs with like minded newsletters and partners is great for subscribers, but it's also great for building relationships and creating valuable content that you can repurpose. So go and get after it, folks.

[A]

Yeah, go talk to people. Don't sit in your basement by yourself and just write all day like I do.

[B]

It doesn't have to be a one man or one woman show, that's for sure.

[A]

Yes, exactly.

[B]

All right, cool.

[A]

All right. Talk to you next time.

[B]

Next time. Hey, Dylan here. You know what sucks? When your newsletter plateaus and growth completely stalls out. It happened to me last year, but instead of panicking or worrying, I hopped into Chanel's Growth Vault. The Growth Vault has over 30 tactics and lessons on getting more subscribers and keeping them subscribed and engaged. I pulled out a few new strategies and implemented them that very day. The best part is these strategies are super tactical and they even come with video walkthroughs from Chanel. Oh, and the Growth Vault is constantly growing. Whenever Chanel finds a new proven strategy, she adds it and you get instant access. And for a limited time, the Growth Vault even includes Chanel's subscriber onboarding course, 10 lessons, and a few extra tips and tricks to make sure the subscribers you work so hard to get actually stick around. Check it all out in the growth [e-mail] vault.