Three and a half years.

That’s how long it took Harry Dry to build his newsletter to 120k subs.

Crazy, right?

When newsletters reach that level, we often think that they’ve gone through the complex work of buying ads, acquisitions, and promotions.

But Harry’s story is different.

His strategy is easy to replicate.

You don’t even need money for it — just time, hard work, and consistency.

Something we all innately have.

Since I respect you and your time, here’s the strategy in one line:

People Seeing Your Work + Conversion + Sign-Ups

Now you can leave and take that with what you will..

OR

Spend 3 minutes learning more about those 3 points.

I promise it’ll be worth your time.

The amount of gems here is unmatched — especially if you’re trying to build something online from zero.

Let’s start!

I. People Seeing Your Work

Harry’s target audience are marketers.

It’s obvious who his website — Marketing Examples — is for.

When he started, the site was a ghost town. No one in the marketing world knew it existed.

So what’s the solution?

Find out where marketers hang out and bring the website to them.

Harry scoured the interweb and came up with a list of groups and platforms:

With this list, you’d think all is well, right?

Nope. Far from it.

99% of these groups hate self-promotion. You’ll be loathed by members and be banned in most of them.

If you’re planning on doing this, here’s the takeaway:

After 6 months of doing this strategy, he shared a breakdown of where most of his audience came from:

II. Conversion

The easiest way to convert traffic is to make something people want to subscribe to.

But here’s the problem…

Most people think they can persuade someone by saying:

• Don’t miss the next issue..

• Subscribe for more updates..

• Get my newsletter every Friday in your inbox..
  

Can you point out what’s wrong?

It shows no benefit of subscribing to you. It’s bland and boring.

You NEED to give people an incentive to follow you.

Here are a few examples by Harry:

III. Sign Ups

The next strategy is to make it easy for them to subscribe. The easier it is to input their emails, the higher the chance of them doing your CTA.

When Harry started, he had 4 easy ways for visitors to subscribe: