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How Beehiiv Helps Solopreneurs Grow and Earn
And why I chose it to host my newsletter
Candice Grobler
August 19, 2024
How Beehiiv helps Solopreneurs Grow and Earn
By now I’ve explained why I need to evolve Candid’s marketing practices, and why an owned newsletter channel makes the most sense.
Today I’d like to give a breakdown of the different email tools that I tested out, and why I decided to go with Beehiiv as my long-term newsletter platform.
What features do you need?
Before I jump into any tool, it is important that I check what it can do so that I don’t spend money unnecessarily. This also means I must have a good idea of the tools I’m already using, and how they may not be meeting my needs.
Keeping this in mind helps reduce your overall operational complexity, but will also save you money.
Since I want my newsletter to be an engagement channel for leads that have already shown interest in my brand, I need to make sure it:
Integrates easily (and cheaply) with my lead generation (LinkedIn) and nurturing platforms (Circle.so),
Allows me to have a back-and-forth conversation with my readers, rather than an just blasting them with one-way advertisements and sermons.
Allows content to stay evergreen and not just stagnate in some dusty corner of your inbox (no shade - that’s 100% me 😂)
Makes it easier for me to grow my email list and audience — though I had about a 5% confidence that this was possible.
And lastly, I had to keep in mind the thing I hate about most newsletters. You know, when brand’s just put all their adverts, promotions and past content into an email digest and expect you to not hit “unsubscribe“…
I wanted a newsletter platform that incentivized and rewarded intentional writing - because I don’t just want to write another newsletter that becomes spam.
What platforms are worth considering?
Platform | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
It can help me grow my audience and increase the reach of my newsletter | This isn’t an owned channel and you don’t have consent to contact or clear performance analytics. | |
ConvertKit | This is a full email marketing solution that doesn’t just do newsletters - it allows broadcasts and product sales. | It doesn’t integrate with any SA payment processors - and is a LOT more complex to learn the platform. |
Circle’s Digest | It gets automatically sent out every Thursday. | It is literally just a digest of what’s happening - it falls into the trap of a “bad“ newsletter. |
Mailchimp | Like ConvertKit, it is a full email marketing solution. | It doesn’t have features that make it easier to grow your newsletter |
HubSpot | I love how newsletters are directly tied to your CRM and any other marketing/sales metric. | It is VERY expensive to get the really useful features, and the starter tier really isn’t sufficient compared to it’s complexity. |
Mailerlite | Simple to configure and get going - and includes other marketing tools (like landing pages and campaigns) | It doesn’t have a referral network or smart monetisation tools. |
Substack | They’ve got a great referral program, and internal advertisement to grow your audience. Plus they allow multi-media content. | You don’t own this audience as you don’t actually get anyone’s email addresses. (See this article for more) |
Based on the above, Beehiiv really stuck out to me because of these core capabilities:
Lead generation: Grow your email list organically — without social media!
Their referral network makes it easy to partner with similar brands who have the same audience and mutually grow your audience.
Current audience members can refer their friends to unlock tiered set of rewards based on successful sign-ups.
I can move my website over to Beehiiv entirely and it will get more traffic than my current hacked-together google site. See how The Open Letter did this.
Monetisation: Make money while marketing
You can directly monetise your newsletter by adding in unique content for paid subscribers and opening up a paid membership.
By recommending partner newsletters, you earn affiliate commission if anyone does end up buying from them.
You can even run adverts to expand the reach if you don’t have any current partners!
They work with Stripe Express - so as a South African I’m not disadvantaged by payment processors like on ConvertKit.
If you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll have seen me write about some of the operational frustrations of running an online business. And these really make it difficult to easily convert customers because of the manual overhead involved in initiating these processes.
In the end, Beehiiv makes it easier for me to grow my audience, monetise my content and engage those who are here in real discussions and research (a mini community if you will).
Candid News:
In the spirit of all the juicy information you’ve learned about Beehiiv, I’ve got two bits of exciting news:
If you buy a subscription to Beehiiv and forward me the receipt, I will give you 1x free 45min coaching call to discuss your newsletter strategy. And we can even talk about recommending each other if our audiences match! 😉
If you successfully refer 2x new reader’s to this newsletter, I’ll send you my Notion template: Newsletter Analytics Dashboard.
Got a brand or marketing question?
Otherwise let me know what you thought of this newsletter here, follow me on LinkedIn or reply to find out more about joining the Candid Community.
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