Find Your Niche

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This is Fatherpreneur, the newsletter about newsletters that's written by a dad with a mustache who's been writing newsletters for 10 years.

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Identify Your Niche Early, Then Double Down

Everyone wants to be an expert at something. But the truth is, most people who say they’re experts aren’t experts. When defining your newsletter strategy, you want to be sure that you are actually skilled enough at the topic you’re writing about for people to spend time in their day reading what you send them.

The Growth in Reverse newsletter by Chenell serves as an excellent example of a newsletter who has identified their target audience. In each of her newsletters, Chenell addresses newsletter creators who would like to discover industry secrets for growing a newsletter audience to 50k and beyond.

How?

She reverse engineers newsletter creators who have been there, done that, and teaches the playbook to everyone else who would like to do the same.

Another newsletter with a well-defined niche is Cult of Mac. They are totally obsessed with Apple Products, and their newsletter gives helpful and consistent advice about existing and upcoming Apple products, features, and more. Their niche is anyone who uses or is interested in Apple products, and they speak to that niche really well.

Define your niche, and stay in your lane. Do what others aren’t doing, and do it extremely well. Give readers a reason to open your email, and make the reason so good that they get FOMO if they don’t open it.

The best way to escape competition is via authenticity. Focus on one niche and be as authentic as possible by sharing your unique experience that no one else can mimic.

Clean Your Newsletter List

Every now and again you need to pull up your pants by the suspenders, clinch your fist, and clean your list.

If people don’t want to open your email, remove them. (okay there is a bit more to it, but that’s the gist).

Clean your list.

Morning Brew had the below CTA in their daily newsletter for the past few weeks. Easy and simple, gets the job done.

This example is an effective method to ask for engagement and communicate directly to your subscribers about your upcoming list cleaning. By using a combination of people who click the link (highly engaged) and those who open the email but possibly click some different link, you can segment your audience into buckets.

1. At the very least, you know who is an inactive subscriber.

2. At most you can segment those who didn’t open + didn’t click the requested link and remove them (because you said you would…)

Periodically clean your list to ensure your subscribers are active, opening, and engaging with your emails.

Beyond the obvious reasons of increasing open rates and CTRs, regularly performing a list cleaning over time also:

1. Increases deliverability by making your domain + IP more reputable and trusted by inboxes

2. Decreases spam rates because those who are receiving your emails actually want to receive them

3. Renders more accurate audience data for better data-driven decisions for your content vertical and/or organization

4. Makes selling ads easier because sponsors like lists that are engaged (good open rates and CTRs)

5. Helps you to further identify who is your ICP (ideal customer profile) and provide excellent content to that niche

A lot of people struggle to clean their list because it feels counterintuitive.

“You’re telling me I should intentionally lessen my total subscriber count?”

Yes that is what I’m telling you.

Having 10,000 very engaged subscribers is better than having a list of 100,000 who never open your emails.

Clean 🧼

I use beehiiv for my newsletter. A really helpful audience segment to build to determine who on your list is unengaged in this one below.

Measuring both open rate + click through rate over time is probably the most conservative way to clean your list.

If you remove people using only open rate parameters, then there may be some discrepancies based on different Apple/device privacy settings (it might show that someone does or doesn’t open when in fact the opposite is true).

Measuring both open rate + click through rate ensures only those who have both not opened and not clicked are considered inactive and can be removed.

Newsletter Growth Community

The newsletter growth community is now open to everybody!

Who is it for?

Join 350 other newsletter operators who are eager to network – for free! The community has newsletter creators with lists anywhere between 1 - 100,000+ subscribers. There is a mixture of people just beginning as well as newsletter veterans. If you think the community might be for you, it probably is.

Where do I join?

Telegram: Jump on over to our Telegram group chat. Introduce yourself, and begin to network with other newsletter operators.

Newsletter Growth Twitter Community: Launched yesterday with almost 100 members already. Keep your eye on this community for newsletter insights and growth tips.

Your newsletter could be growing faster

Why are all your favorite newsletters switching to beehiiv?

It’s because the founding beehiiv team were all early Morning Brew employees who helped scale that newsletter to over 4 million daily subscribers.

Years of experience went into building the precise tools and surfacing the optimal data needed to successfully scale a newsletter…and now, every newsletter on beehiiv has access to this type of ecosystem.

So, what exactly does beehiiv offer?

• World-class growth tools like the referral program and recommendation network

• Monetization via premium subscriptions and their ad network

• Seamless and flexible content creation with a sleek collaborative editor

• Best-in-class inbox deliverability of 99.9%

Not to mention, it’s the most affordable email platform on the market.

Get started for free.

This week I taught my toddler how to write a newsletter. I think he’s off to a great start.

That’s it for today. Thanks so much for reading.

1. For daily newsletter tweets and insights, follow me @danielcberk on Twitter.

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