Week 3: More FB ads, newsletter referrals, and mangos

Welcome to the 3rd update of my minimum viable newsletter experiment: Be Like Shiva

(See previous update’s here)

In today's email:

• Bad news on the Facebook ads front :(

• A look at the new video ads I ordered from Fiverr

• 3 impactful things I learned about running a newsletter biz this week

Week 3: the numbers

I spent a lot of time in the weeds of Facebook ads manager and other ad creation tools last week.

Here are the numbers so far:

374 total subscribers (152 new subs this week)

A 51% open rate and a 4% CTR on the second newsletter

(I used ConvertKits ‘resend to unopened contacts’ feature this week, which boosted the open rate a little)

How much I’m paying per sub from FB ads

Bad news: my CPA’s went up this week.

Last week I mentioned that my two best performing ads had CPA’s around $1.05. This week those CPA is around $1.45

I have no idea what happened, so I’m doing the only thing I can do right now:

Test more ads.

I turned off a bunch of poorly performing ads and rotated in new styles of video ads. I’m excited to see how they go.

If you want to spy on my ads, click here.

What else happened in week 3?

Not much to be honest. It was a slow week.

I shipped the 3rd edition of the newsletter, of course.

And I finally got the newsletter recommendation engine Sparkloop live.

It looks like this:

I also spent a LOT of time creating new video ads.

Creating video ads is a completely new skill for me, which meant a lot of time learning, therefore everything happened at snails pace.

But I like how the ads turned out.

(Let’s see how they perform)

You can see them all here, but here’s a sneak peak:

I also created a lead magnet to test a Facebook incentive lead generation campaign. This is where you offer a lead magnet directly on FB rather than sending them your website.

Its not live yet, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see the results from that one.

3 Newsletter Biz lessons I Learned this week

Here are 3 things I learned this week that will help you build your own niche newsletter:

1) All the great newsletters are doing giveaway referrals

After coming across this tweet, I realize its silly NOT to have something like this set up:

You can learn a lot from reverse engineering big newsletters, and if all the big newsletter are doing referral giveaways, it must be worth it.

Unfortunately this feature is not built into ConvertKit (it is with Beehiiv), so I’m going to have to use a 3rd party tool like Sub Shark.

Takeaway - Use your audience to help grow your newsletter faster with newsletter referral programs

Sorry. There are no 2nd and 3rd newsletter biz lessons this week…

I was too busy in the weeds of ad creation this week.

And to be honest I was in Costa Rica doing cool s**t. like picking Mangoes and riding quad bikes:

So instead allow me to offer you 3 tweets that will help you level up as a newsletter creator:

The first is a knowledge bomb from Emanuel on growing Stacked Marketer

This is basically a battle tested playbook to grow your newsletter this year. If you follow these steps, you can’t fail.

A tweet that made me think: Marketing Max’s Niche Newsletter Maths

Doing back of the envelope calculations like this is fun.

(It’s also a great way to procrastinate)

But its a strong incentive for anyone creating a newsletter to start thinking about creating a course.

Not sure what course you should create? Ask your subscribers. You DO have a welcome email survey, right??

(P.s. I feel Max’s 10% conversion rate here is too optimistic, but a boy can dream, right?)

Finally: here’s the 80/20 of an effective welcome email from Matt McGarry

The most important thing you can do in your welcome email is force your new subscriber to get your email landing in their inbox.

Make it easy for them.

What's in store for next week:

• Shipping newsletter #4


• Set up the newsletter referral program with Sub Shark

• Work on my landing page conversion rate (its currently 40%, and i’ve done zero tweaks to it since launching)

That’s it for this week.

Questions? Feedback? advice? I want it all….please hit reply right now and let me know!