[00:00:00] Hey, real quick, do you remember how you first found this podcast? Maybe a tweet. Maybe a friend sent it to you, or maybe you saw it on an Instagram story. This podcast only grows through word of mouth. I don't run ads, I don't have sponsorships, so I don't make any money off of this podcast. So my ask of you is to please pass it on to another creative out there, a podcast review, a post on Instagram or Twitter, or a mention to a friend.
It'd mean a lot to me, and it might help another entrepreneur out there. Thank you. Social media algorithms are. Constantly changing. Photographers are working harder and getting less reach across the board. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. What if I told you there's actually another way to reach your audience? It's an alternative that takes less effort, gets you in front of your entire audience, and you control it 100%. Today we're talking about email newsletters.
Over the past year, I've sent a newsletter every single week and grown it to [00:01:00] nearly 5,000 subscribers with 50% open rates. Today I'm teaching you how you can do the same. If this is your first time here, my name. Chris Pieta, I teach creative business and our product photography company. Most newsletter fail in the first few months because people have no strategy.
This episode is breaking down the why, the how, and at the end, I'm telling you my secret to how I was able to generate nearly 5,000 subscribers and just over a year, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter. All these social media channels rely on one thing to bring your content in front of your audience, the algorithm.
Each social media channel has its own algorithm, which dictates who is gonna see your content and how many people are gonna be able to see it. And yes, they say if your content is valuable and good, the algorithms will show it to a bunch of people. But that's not always the case. How can we guarantee all of our audience sees our stuff?
An email newsletter, there's no algorithms here. These emails are going straight to your inbox. You get emails and you either open them or archive them and that's it. [00:02:00] No algorithm pushing certain emails to the top. Everything is sorted when you get the email, and yeah, there are a lot of times that you'll get an email.
Read the subject and archive it before ever opening it, but at least you read the subject line. You gave that email a chance. In the world of social media, you don't even see half the content from most of the people that you follow. I get comments like this all the time. I wish Instagram would show me more of your stuff.
People literally asking the app to push more of my content to them. It's a hard landscape to compete in, but I just focus on doing the work. I can't control what the algorithm does, but my email list is completely in my control. Over the past couple years, I've built out an email list. Of thousands of my followers.
These are the people that are really, really eager to learn from me. They really care about starting and scaling their own creative businesses. They're driven to succeed. Every week I send out my newsletter and about half my newsletter subscribers end up opening it, and that's a pretty insane engagement rate if you think about it.
Imagine posting a reel on social [00:03:00] media and half of your followers like it. That would be insane because of the high open rate of emails. You're going to be able to engage with your audience better and deliver that value that you strive for.
Now, I'm painting a really pretty picture of an email newsletter here. The reality is that they're really hard to get right. It's hard to get people to give you your email. It's hard to create something people want to open.
When I started my first newsletter back in 2020, after a year of doing it, I only had about 200 subscribers and the open rates were only about 20 to 30%. Not great. I was sending it once every two weeks, and there's one critical mistake I made. I thought it was a good newsletter. But the numbers didn't lie.
The problem with this newsletter was that I made it about me. I talked about what photos I shot that week, what new gear I was using, what lesson I learned. It simply wasn't about my audience. I was writing a newsletter. I was essentially writing a journal for myself. Now, don't get me wrong, journaling is great, but if you want a successful newsletter, [00:04:00] you need to know what your audience wants and you need to make it about them.
If you need an example of this, subscribe to my newsletter and see what I do. Link for that as in a description of this podcast. So what makes a good newsletter? I've gone through a lot of iterations over the years, and I think I've landed on something that resonates with a lot of people. The guiding principle here is you need to make it about the person reading the newsletter.
The newsletter isn't about you, it's about your audience. How do I do this? My process is actually pretty simple. I try and think of something that I've struggled with when I was starting my creative business. I think about what my audience might struggle with too. I'm essentially writing this for myself three years ago.
I wrote a short story on that topic and I asked myself, what was my dream outcome? What was the obstacle I was facing and how did I overcome the obstacle? The topics vary each week, and there's always something fresh. For example, I was struggling with low ticket clients that were barely paying a thousand bucks a photo project.
I figured out how I turned that $1,000 client into a [00:05:00] $10,000 client. I share my struggle. I share what I did. And I provide actionable steps for my audience to do that too. Now you're probably noticing that the newsletter is still talking about me a lot, and that's fine. I'm using storytelling as a way to deliver value to my audience.
And yes, while a story is about me, it's really meant for my audience to put themselves in my shoes. My goal is to have my audience live what I lived. I'm not journaling for myself anymore. I'm writing for my audience. Providing value is the biggest thing you need to do when writing your newsletter. Value gets thrown around a lot on the internet.
Provide value, 10 audience, and they will come. But what does value mean? What makes content valuable? My old newsletter that I had wasn't really valuable to my audience. I was just sharing photos that I liked. They see pretty pictures all over social media. That wasn't really that valuable. My current newsletter teaches creative business in a way they can't find anywhere else.
Each week they learn something new that they can apply. It's the years, my own [00:06:00] experience condensed into a few paragraph. That's the kind of value I'm talking about. If you want an example, there's a link below that shows you my newsletter.
You're going to need to figure out what value you can deliver. Each of us has had a unique set of experiences through life. It's gotten us to where we are today. Now ask yourself, what are you good at? Photography, filmmaking, writing stories, whatever it is, you can merge your own life experiences with what you're good at to provide valuable insight to how you got to where you are today.
And you might say, well, Chris, I'm not that good yet. I'm still learning. Do you think that people would be interested in learning alongside with you? You're better than you were a year ago, right? What if your target audience is you from a year ago? You're a few steps ahead, and people will be able to relate to that pretty easily.
It's very hard to find a topic, and it's okay to switch it up until you land on something that. Sticks. But don't forget, the next part of the equation during the process is consistency. I talk about consistency a lot on this podcast. You need to be consistently sending emails to new leads every day, [00:07:00] post consistently to grow on social, practice your craft every day.
The reason I talk about consistency so much is that it's the recipe for success. Do something consistently for a long period of time and you will succeed. It's a very boring formula. But there's no shortcuts here and the boring stuff works. Your newsletter is no exception. If you want to have a successful newsletter, you're going to have to be consistent
first. Pick a sending frequency either every week or every two weeks. If you're just starting out, every two weeks is fine. But remember, the more often you send it, the more people will remember it. So try and work towards that every week timeline. But let's say you pick every two weeks to start, you better send it every two weeks.
Newsletters need to be on a schedule like this. It's like a magazine subscription. You expect it to come every single month. Same is true with a newsletter. Consistency is critical in creating a valuable newsletter. Over time, people become more and more excited for your content. They'll recognize your content sending schedule, and they'll look forward to it every week.
On Friday mornings, they [00:08:00] might be checking their inbox for your newsletter because they know you send it on every Friday morning, pick a sending schedule and stick with it. Newsletters aren't that time consuming to write either maybe one or two hours, and that's not a really big time commitment for the results they can get from this.
Okay, next up, how do we actually get people to sign up for our newsletters? Is, I've actually asked you to sign up for mine twice throughout this episode. First start with what value you provide, and then you ask something like this. Do you want creative business tips in your inbox weekly? Click the link below this episode and join my newsletter.
See, simple as that. I start by telling what value my audience. Sketch, creative Business Tips, and then I ask them to join Easy Pain-Free and guaranteed to get you a signup or two. You just have to ask here, okay? But there is another way you can get people to sign up, and this is where actually I get most of my subscribers from.
I'm gonna save this method for the end of this episode, so stay tuned for that. Let's talk about sending platforms real quick. There's a lot of places that you [00:09:00] can host and newsletter these days. And it doesn't really matter which one you choose to start, but here's what I recommend. First off, I use Kajabi.
Kajabi is an all-in-one platform. I love the newsletter feature on it. It's got really good analytics. You can build out courses on there. Literally everything you want to build an online business is in Kajabi, but it's expensive and it's not for everyone. It's 150 bucks a month to start. So if you don't plan on building a website or a business around this, It's definitely not worth it.
Convert Kit, on the other hand, is way more affordable. It's free for your first thousand subscribers and that's a great deal for you. It's got a lot of tools and analytics and it can be a great place to start. I recommend going through Convert Kit over Cajabi. If you're just starting out here, when you start writing a newsletter and creating a newsletter, you'll see a bunch of templates.
On these websites. From my experience, the simpler the template, the better. Right now my newsletter is just straight text and it's working really well. My old one was a bunch of images, this fancy layout, and it wasn't [00:10:00] really working for me, so I switched it up into the simple template and my audience.
Seems to love it. Pick a simple template and stick with it. Okay, we got the template down. What's the one thing that we haven't talked about yet? We haven't talked about the subject line. The subject line is so, so important. The subject line is your hook. It's what will convince readers to actually open your newsletter.
You want to instill some curiosity, build up some sort of question in their head that will make them want to click and read. This is hard to do, but over time you will get better at this. It's just like generating titles for a YouTube video, writing captions for a social media post. You want to evoke that sense of cur curiosity, and then write a subject around that.
All right. Let's talk about that secret method to getting subscribers. I mentioned earlier it's called a lead magnet. Some of you have already heard of these, but it's essentially something free that you give your audience in exchange for an email. I've got a few lead magnets myself. One is my free creative business checklist.
It promises you to jumpstart [00:11:00] your creative business in 30 days, and it'll help you go from no business to a business where you can actually serve clients. This thing is super valuable and I've gotten over 5,000 downloads on it, and people just love it. It's a four page document that's available, uh, for free on my website, and all you have to do is put in your email address.
When someone downloads this, they're subscribed to my newsletter. They can always unsubscribe if they want to, but 99% of the time they don't. Because my newsletter delivers so much value when they first get that first newsletter issue in their mailbox, they don't want to unsubscribe because the stuff in the newsletter is actually good and it's related to the lead magnet.
My other lead magnet is a free 30 minute course on getting your first paying client. I've actually just redone this and added an extra 30 minutes of content to it, so now it's a 60 minute workshop on how to get your. First paying clients. I created this free course as a lead magnet, scripted it out, recorded it, and published it.
It teaches you the exact steps to get your first paying client, and it's crazy that I'm offering it for free right now. There's over [00:12:00] 1900 students inside of it, but that's only because it's such a powerful lead magnet. It's a really compelling offer, so your audience can't help but want it. By the way, if you don't have either of those yet, they're on my website.
Creative Biz launch.com. Go grab them. They're free. They have so much value
and if you do subscribe to these things, they will actually add you to my newsletter list, and that's the whole point of the lead magnet. The lead magnet is here to get subscribers. To your newsletter and once they're subscribed, they love the newsletter and they keep coming back for more because it delivers value.
Value is the name of the game here. Provide value, do it consistently, and you'll have a great newsletter. So if you're just starring your newsletter out, I actually recommend you subscribe to my Lead Magnets because they'll show you how to do a newsletter the right way. The lead magnets will be great for you to look at.
Maybe you can create your own. They are similar. And then you can create a newsletter to go along with that. That's all I got today. My name is Chris Pieta. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next episode.
