What I learned from sending 100 newsletter issues [IPF #100🎉] - Adriana Tica

This is issue no. 100 of Ideas to Power Your Future. Can you believe it? I feel like I just started sending these out regularly two months ago.

But no. I’ve been sending at least one email per week, every week, for 100 weeks straight. When I first started, I thought I knew email marketing — pro-level. Boy, was I wrong.

I still had plenty to learn.

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Right, so here are my lessons after 100 issues:

1. The inner work is the real game-changer

I rarely talk about this because I’m neither a psychologist nor a life coach. But when you build a brand that’s centered on YOU, you need to be on good terms with yourself.

My previous business was easier: here’s the agency, this is what WE do. If we fuck up, it’s on US, not just me. Plus, even when it was just me, it was easier to hide behind a brand name.

I can’t do that anymore. So I had to do a lot of inner work to be able to promote my “outer” work and my services. It’s not as easy to say “hey, I know what I’m doing, you should pay me for it”. Or, at least, it didn’t come easy to me — in the beginning.

How I fixed it: whenever I felt crippled by imposter syndrome, I thought about what I’d advise my clients to do. Lo and behold, that advice was never “Shut up, you’re not good enough”.

TL;DR: building a personal brand is not for the faint of heart. I’ve still got work to do in this space but I’ve come a long way.

2. Regularity matters more than you think

There are two non-negotiables in my business:

Never miss a client deadline unless something cataclysmic happens (think: a medical emergency, an earthquake, and so on).
Never miss a newsletter issue.

So far, I’ve kept up with both. The first one for a decade, the second for 100 weeks.

I wrote and sent this email through COVID, excruciating backpain, long-ass to-do lists, and more.

I do it because I know myself: if I allow myself to slip up once, I’ll do it again. And regularity is very, very important in the newsletter space.

A lot of my subscribers tell me how they wait for my newsletter to enjoy it with their morning coffee. So I make sure they don’t just stare into the abyss when they have their coffee.

Like you, I have bad days and bad weeks. Writing this newsletter is my favorite part of most weeks but, even so, it sometimes feels like a chore — a hard one!

What helps me push through:

An idea bank. At every given moment, I have at least 20 ideas (I save them in Google Keep) I can choose from. If it’s a bad week, I’ll go with a topic that feels easier to write.
Writing in advance. In the beginning, I used to wait until the last moment to write this, so Thursday morning would usually find me typing frantically. These days, I start earlier — on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. I may not finish the whole issue but not starting from scratch one hour before send time helps me a lot.

3. Consistently improving your process and your emails is key

See how I didn’t say “consistency”? Too many people think consistency = showing up every day, the same way.

That’s bollocks. A monkey could do that.

Consistency is showing up a bit better every day. There have been a lot of changes to this newsletter in the past (almost) two years. From branding to layout, from topics to promotional activities, almost everything has changed.

If I had shown up the exact same way every week, I’d still be scrambling to get my first 1000 subscribers.

Which takes me to my most painful realization:

4. The newsletter industry is hard AF

Before starting this newsletter, I had done a ton of email marketing, so I was sure my newsletter would be a MASSIVE success from day 1.

*Pauses for laughter*

You see, the email marketing I did pre-newsletter was for SaaS companies, larger businesses, tech companies, and more.

Remember what I said above about the inner work? Right, when it came to my own brand, it was as if my marketer’s brain was wiped clean — tabula rasa, nothing to see here.

Acting as my own advisor helped A LOT, especially with taking emotion out of it. However, what helped the most in this case was realizing I was using the wrong tools — I was playing a “regular” business game and that doesn’t work here.

Newsletters are entirely different beasts. The personal branding, expert-led business space is wildly different. Here’s why:

You have to strike a perfect balance between personality and actual business talk.
You can’t do endless sales pitches and cover your ass with a flimsy discount coupon.
You need to do it yourself — there’s no outsourcing it, no matter how good a copywriter is. People catch on.

5. Scaling up can be hard — emotionally, not just practically

When I had fewer than 200 subscribers I knew almost everyone on my list. So I would often wonder “Did Matt get a chance to read this? What about Hannah? Did they like it?”

As I refreshed my ConvertKit dashboard and saw an uptick in open rates, my heart raced a bit because I knew one of my friends had read it.

These days, that’s not happening anymore. And…weird as it may sound, I kinda miss it.

I don’t know most of the people on my list (if we’ve never chatted before, reply and say hi. I answer all the emails!) and that frustrates me a bit.

Just a bit, though. I’d be hypocritical to say I don’t enjoy having a much bigger email list.

Which brings me to my next point.

6. You should never get too attached to a marketing tactic

All marketing tactics decay with time — I wrote an issue on this exact topic because it’s a theory that’s proven correct time and time again.

When I started this newsletter, LinkedIn was my best growth channel. Today, it’s far from that.

With the algorithm changes, I had to find new ways to grow. This is an endless exploration, I don’t see it stopping any time soon.

I’ll dive deeper into what channels I use now in four weeks when we have another anniversary issue (two years of Ideas to Power Your Future!). Until then, I’ll just say that my top channels right now are the Kit (formerly ConvertKit) Creator Network, cross-promos, and Medium.

7. It takes a village

Hi! Former lone wolf here — reformed now!

Luckily, I learned pretty fast that I can’t do this without building strong connections. So I took the time to deepen strategic relationships but, and this is important, also relationships that nurture me.

I explored them with curiosity and openness, with zero business-related expectations.

I made real friends, not just business friends and I built a solid network of partners, advisors, and people I look up to. Without them, I’d still be scrambling.

More importantly, I stuck to the “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you need a different room” mantra. That’s how I met Chenell, for instance, the brain behind Growth in Reverse, today’s sponsor.

Her newsletter alone helped more than any other resource and being in her community has been this year’s biggest growth lever for me — mentally and business-wise.

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🎙️ My podcasts and interviews

I joined Jay Immanuel on the Your First $1K+ podcast for a refreshing talk. There are a lot of conversations about scaling to 6 and 7 figures but very few about getting a sustainable revenue stream as fast as possible. Tune in for episode 1 and episode 2 (yes, we talked so much that it had to be split into two episodes).