At the start of this year, I kicked off a side project to send a weekly curated newsletter on growth marketing, called growth.email. Basically, I read a ton of articles, choose the ten best and send a weekly email to over 1,600 subscribers.
I’ve had a number of questions since I started on how I put these emails together, so here’s the workflow I use to create each weekly issue.
Curate a number of feeds
I use Feedly to bring in many RSS feeds, and categorise them by topic. Each week, as part of my process, I add and remove feeds, to get the best content into my reading list.
I will scour Reddit, Twitter and Facebook for new interesting articles and typically skim a few other articles on the same site, then add the feed to my Feedly.
Feedly screen
Read a huge list of articles
I try my best to have a variety of topics and sources in each issue. For example, I’ll only include 1-2 social media marketing articles in any one week, as well as avoid choosing the same source for more than 1 or 2 articles in an issue. The last anyone wants to read in a curated newsletter are 10 articles in one week all on a specific growth area, or from the same source.
I try to read a couple of articles every evening. I start by skimming the article, ensuring it is useful and not just an advertisement for a product, has actionable advice and is at least 500 or more words. If it meets these criteria, I will then go through and read the article properly, ensuring that it is quality content, and will appeal to my audience.
Save it to my newsletter library
The great thing about my chosen curated newsletter tool, Goodbits, is that they have a Chrome plugin, which allows me to save the very best articles as candidates for inclusion. I just click the plugin button, rewrite the title and summary if required, and it then gets saved into the content library, along with thumbnail images.
Goodbits chrome plugin
Build the newsletter
When I decide I have enough articles in my library, I then go into Goodbits, review my content library, and drag and drop the articles I wish to include in this weeks curated newsletter.
I will then add the overall email introduction and footer text, add that issues sponsor link, and send myself a copy to check and review.
Goodbits
Schedule to send
I send every issue of growth.email at the very same time each week. Because I’m in Perth, Western Australia, and most of the subscribers are in the USA or UK, I schedule it for 8.30pm Wednesdays local time, which is 1.30pm in London, or 8.30am on the east coast of the US.
Whilst I realise it may be late night on the east coast of Australia, or very early morning elsewhere, it is more about the consistency than the actual local time. People get in the habit of expecting my curated newsletter at a particular time of their local day.
Homeslice showing time zones
Add to my content spreadsheet
I use a Google Sheet to track all my previous shared articles, to check I don’t double up, as well as use this list to create articles such as my last blog post, as well as export for easy sharing on social media.
Google sheet of content
Answer queries from readers and sponsors
I am very lucky to have so far attracted all sponsors organically, and haven’t had to go looking for sponsors. People and brands approach me by email, and it’s a case of sharing the rate and next available dates.
I’m sure that one day I will have to go hunting for sponsors, however I am enjoying spending my effort on finding quality content, and not on chasing money to pay for it at this stage.
I tend to also receive a couple of emails each week, with feedback either on the entire newsletter or a specific article. I sometimes get content suggestions by email or social as well.
Curated newsletters can be work
Curating a quality content newsletter is a manual and sometimes long task, however the alternatives are all automated and quality can’t be maintained. The point of a curated newsletter, is ensuring content is high quality and on topic, hence why readers will subscribe.
Running growth.email overall is an enjoyable experience, I get to read a lot, and I receive regular great feedback from readers, such as below.
Curated newsletter feedback
If you are considering starting a curated email newsletter, then I highly recommend you give it a go. The enjoyment of sharing something you are passionate about, and getting great reader feedback if it all goes well, is very motivating.
If you haven’t yet, don’t let all my hard efforts above go to waste – sign up to growth.email and get 10 great articles in your inbox every week. Thanks!
I’ve spent dozens of hours, reading over 650 growth hacking articles in my mission of collating the ten best articles every week to send to my growth.email subscribers. Now, with 22 issues in the archives, I have categorised and listed 212 of the best growth articles for you below.
212 Killer Growth Hacking Articles Published This Year
Affiliate & Referral Marketing
“Referral sales means closing your new and current customers on the concept of introducing you to other companies that are likely to need the solution you’ve built.” – Steli Efti.
“Analytics not only tells you what is problems you have on your website; it will also tell you what changes you need to make to fix these problems.You just have to examine and analyze the data carefully.” – Khalid Saleh
“There are some great applications popping up from brands that genuinely add value to the end consumer, and early signs are showing that consumers are actually responding really well to them.” – Matthew Barby.
“To get traction, implement these ten strategies top writers use to identify questions, drive traffic, build community, and creating a huge, loyal following fast.” – Josh Fechter
“A content upgrade plays on the fear of missing out because the reader has already invested a lot of time into the content – they want the full picture, but part of it’s being held back.” – Sujan Patel.
“Put simply, copywriting is writing to persuade, convert, and sell. Good copywriting gets clicks, shares, and opens. Bad copywriting gets swept under the rug.” – Robbie Richards.
“According to Econsultancy, “only about 22 percent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.” So, what’s going wrong? – Neil Patel.
There isn’t a way I could include a list of growth hacking articles, without covering conversion rate optimisation (CRO for short). CRO can often make or break a campaign, and these links will explain how.
“To define the viral loop, you can think of it as the steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users” – Andrew Chen.
These growth hacking articles are general in nature, covering many facets of how to improve growth in your product, business or service.
“Power words are so named because they leap off the page (or screen). They arrest attention. Which is exactly what you need when your ads are competing with people’s families and friends for attention on Facebook.” – Brad Smith.
If you need advice on AdWords, FB Advertising or more, these growth hacking articles will give you a great kick start.
“For many startups, SEO is viewed in the same vein as Tarot cards and palm readings. The whole process seems like a sham, and its reputation isn’t helped by genuinely spammy “SEO outreach emails” where some automated message tells you that your site needs optimization. Yeah, okay.” – Gregory Ciotti.
SEO isn’t a short term solution, however for the medium to long term, these growth hacking articles will show you how to win at getting great rankings.
“When you’re struggling to come up with new, exciting social content, it’s helpful to look back at your “North Star”—a past post that was really successful. By understanding what went well and why, you can set guidelines that will help you consistently produce high-performing content.” – Emily Copp.
These growth hacking articles show you how to build growth using various social media strategies, across a number of platforms.
My sincere gratitude to every one of the writers whose work I feature above; your commitment to sharing your knowledge and lessons are inspiring for all to learn from. I trust you find this hand-curated list of 212 growth hacking articles worth reading, and trust that you’ll join my growth.email weekly growth list.
Every week I share the ten best articles across a wide range of topics, and welcome suggestions to my @thegrowthemail Twitter account as well.
All the best with moving the needle in your business with the many great tips, found in the links above!
Sharing your content on social media is a surefire way to increase traffic to your blog or website, and help you promote your content. The problem is, most people post once, and then move on with their next article – therefore missing an awesome opportunity to continue to re-promote their still very relevant (evergreen) content.
In this post, I break down the absolutely easiest way to continually share your previous content, in a method that can take as little as five minutes a month, and bring your thousands of new visitors and shares.
Ingredients
You will need a few things before we get started.
A Buffer account
Plenty of non-time sensitive content
Wordpress (optional step)
The super-fast WordPress method
An absolutely quick way of exporting the titles and URL’s of every article you’ve ever written is the free plugin, List URLs, available for WordPress. It takes around 30 seconds to install, and then export a CSV file.
Simple exporting in WordPress
Collect all of your content
To promote your content, you will want to start by having a spreadsheet, with a column for the post title, the full URL, and related hashtags. Go through the sheet, and make sure all the encoding is right, and there are no strange characters.
Make sure this content is your best work, and is not time relevant. There is no point in promoting a blog post from two years ago, if it refers to something specific for that year, or is very out of date advice or knowledge.
For example, below is a sheet with most of the articles we’ve written for employee survey startup, 6Q. We have literally posted hundreds of articles over the last few years and most are great examples of evergreen content.
Your content spreadsheet
Choose the best hashtags
Hashtags, especially on Twitter, are a great way to encourage people to discover your tweets, and is a perfect method to promote your content. Tens of thousands of Twitter users every day search topics by hashtag, to find tweets and content worth engaging with.
So how do you know the best hashtags to use? I am a huge fan of Hashtagify, which makes finding appropriate hashtags very easy. You literally enter a seed keyword (in the example below, I used #contentmarketing) and then it uncovers other related hashtags that may suit.
Hashtagify
So, we have now got a sheet with blog title, the full URL and a hashtag or two. Be careful to ensure the title and hashtags aren’t really long, as the old 140 character limit on Twitter may catch you out. Buffer will truncate the URL using your chosen URL shortener, so we can get away with lengthier lines at this point.
Prepare the file for use
Now export this sheet as a CSV (Most programs let you choose ‘Save as CSV’). You will now need to open this file in a text editor, and do two quick search and replace rules. First, remove the comma between the title and URL, and replace with a space. Next, replace the comma between the URL and hashtag, with another character space.
Save the file again, and you should end up looking something similar to the below.
CSV file of content links
Adding to Buffer in bulk
Now comes the best bit. Simply go to Bulk Buffer, connect to your Buffer account, and then upload the file. This will add these links to the end of your current schedule, so feel free to hit the Buffer shuffle button afterwards, to mix things up a bit, and promote your content along with your other content sharing.
Uploading using Bulk Buffer
Influencer engagement tip
If you have a file of other related articles that you’ve read and like, you can do the steps above, and append by @[username] to share their content. I’ve done this with all of the links I have shared in my growth marketing newsletter, as a second method of uncovering great content.
By sharing other peoples content, you are raising awareness with them that you exist too – before you know it, you may end up engaging with these influencers.
Here is an example tweet, where I’ve shared other content, which appeared in my growth.email newsletter, using my own personal Twitter account.
Example tweet using this method
Regularly promote your content
In a few minutes a month, I have shown you how to promote your content over and over, with little effort and for free. Add to the CSV over time, and keep using Bulk Buffer to re-upload and top up your schedule every month.
Find this article useful? If you want to show appreciation, here’s a CSV file of a handful of my articles (including this one), which I’d appreciate you using the above method to share.
