How to Get to Your First 100,000 Followers
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Email, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Writing

Here’s what my email list looked like on June 17.

And here it is today, on July 23.

(Those screenshots are from a very awesome app called List Goal.)

Not bad, right? I added 864 net followers over the last five weeks. That’s a huge increase from 208 new followers in the four weeks prior.

Go me!

So, that’s the straight up number.

But every email list has some churn — people come and people go.

Between May 23 and June 17, 1048 people joined my list and 840 left it. That’s a massive amount of churn and it’s the reason why my email list was feeling stagnent.

New subscribers are a big deal to me. But I needed to work on retaining the the followers I already had. That was my main focus for July and I did some pretty big things to that end that I’m excited to tell you about.

According to my Convertkit stats, I added 1444 new subscribers between June 17 and July 23. I had 645 unsubscribers. So, the churn rate was 44.6%. My churn rate for the four weeks prior (where I had 1048 new subscribers and 840 unsubscribes) was a full 80 percent, so I made a lot of progress on my goal.

There’s still room to improve, but that’s a big correction I think.

What I did This Month

Substack and Newsletters

I talked last month about shifting to a weekly newsletter and starting a second list, on Substack, for my followers who want a daily email. I started that right before my last post.

It’s worked really well. As you can see above, my churn rate slowed from 80 percent to 44.6 percent.

I have added 373 subscribers to my Substack list. Those subscribers get a daily email from me with an excerpt of my daily Medium post and a link to click to finish reading it. I’m not counting these as separate subscribers, because most of them are already on my list and I’m not adding those who aren’t to Convertkit.

“Subscribers” in the photo below refers to paid subscribers. I haven’t monetized my Substack, which is why I have 0 subscribers. There are 373 followers, though, and you can see that it’s growing fairly steadily.

If you go back and read last month’s post, you’ll see that I started that Substack two days earlier, on June 15, and by June 17 I’d added almost 200 subscribers — those were the readers who came over when I sent a notice out to my main email list. In the month since, I’ve added about 175 more subscribers.

The best part of my Substack list, though, is the open and click rate. My Convertkit email list has an open rate of about 20 percent and a click rate of 3 to 4 percent. Pretty standard for email lists. But on Substack my open rate is 40 to 50 percent and my click rate is 30 to 40 percent. The click rate, especially, is extraordinary.

I sent out my fourth weekly newsletter yesterday. I feel like I’m starting to hit my stride with it.

New Series

I started a new thing in July — the idea of focusing some emails on a monthly theme. This month that theme was ‘creating killer characters.’ (My email list is full of fiction writers.)

The goal was to write one post a week — I emailed them out on Fridays.

Post one was introductory

Post two was an audio recording introducing three character development exercises

Post three offered several resources

Post four, this week, will be a link to a big epic blog post that draws it all together.

I really loved the process and the structure it gave my month. The email posts were really well received, so I plan to continue in August with a new theme. I’ll experiment with posting here on Medium about Augusts theme to see if that encourages new subscribers who want the series.

SEO

I have never focused on SEO much, because it doesn’t really translate directly to income on Medium. When people come to my posts via search engine, they’re not usually Medium members and they often don’t clap for my posts.

But it occurred to me last month that if I want to get more people to my email list, I need to get more people to my posts — even if they’re not directly from Medium.

It’s a bit early, but my efforts seem to be working. My views just kind of took off in the last few days. I’ll be able to report better on this in a month or two, when there’s been more time for the SEO to work.

Basically I’ve been visiting Ubersuggest.com and using it to find titles that people are actually searching for. It’s a great tool — and free, which makes it even better.

That’s it. Just using a little bit of SEO in the title of my post. I might try getting deeper into it, but so far I’m okay with sticking there.

I posted fewer posts in this period than I did in the one prior — one a day instead of two most days — and still had more subscribers, so I think my SEO strategy (as minimal as it is) seems to be working. I’ll definitely report more on it in the coming months.

Where My New Followers Came From

As with last month, mostly from my posts here on Medium. Some from my website. I also gained subscribers by asking people who join my Ninja Writers Facebook group if they’d like to be put onto it.

I haven’t run many ads. A few boosted Facebook posts, which may or may not have contributed to the number of followers that came from Medium.

Next Month

I plan to go with a second month of themed email posts in August. I’ll announce it early this time. I’m excited to see if my July epic blog post, that brings all of the themed emails together, is successful here on Medium and works to bring new subscribers to my email list.

I’ll continue working on my churn. The results in the last period were awesome. I think I can do even better.

I’m working right now with a coach who has encouraged me to reach out to other creators to partner with them so that we can get in front of each others’ audiences. My plan for the next month is to reach out to at least two people and see what I can do.

I want to experiment some with getting into Medium-owned publications. I have a post that I hope will be published in Human Parts in the next period. I’ll send at least two more queries.