Growing Marketing Monk has been a rewarding ride, one that’s taught us many lessons (and earned us good bucks).

Over a year, we have crafted over seven newsletters (not counting the ones we do for clients), and Marketing Monk has been our standout success.

It all started in September 2023, and here's everything we've done so far to grow it to 66K+ subscribers.

In partnership with

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Content:

Content remains the backbone of this newsletter.

Without compelling, valuable content, no amount of marketing or promotion can create sustainable growth.

The content strategy was simple: make it better than the paid content available out there.

We applied what we learned from Product Monk and delivered long-form case studies, each taking about 5-8 hours of research and writing.

This has made our audience stick around, and this loyalty is what drives growth.

It’s simple - if you’re not offering real value, you don’t have a business.

Subscriber Growth:

To grow our audience, we began by cross-promoting Marketing Monk through Product Monk.

Cross promoting here didn’t feel intrusive because you’re offering something that’s already relevant to them.

Since the audiences overlapped, this strategy helped us attract quality readers.

It’s important to focus on quality over quantity when you're growing an audience, especially in the early stages.

Next, we leaned into organic growth by posting on platforms like Quora and Reddit.

We joined the conversation and started answering questions related to marketing, sharing our insights, and subtly plugging Marketing Monk wherever it was relevant.

It wasn’t a hard sell; it was more about offering value first, then saying, “Hey, if you liked this answer, you might enjoy our newsletter.”

This boosted our reach, and by then, we had hit 6K subscribers.

Meta Ads:

Once we had validation that our content was valuable and our audience was engaged, we knew it was time to double down on growth.

That’s when we ventured into paid promotion and started experimenting with Meta ads.

Running ads has been (and still is) a continuous learning process.

Ads and trends are always changing, so staying up-to-date is essential. And what works for one audience might not work for another.

But one thing that has been a game-changer for us:

Simple ads work best.

The more cluttered your ad, the less attention it gets.

Overloading ads with graphics and visuals often leads people to scroll right past them.

So, we keep ours clean and easy to read, with just one clear call to action (CTA) that grabs attention.

Experimentation and Learning:

One of the most important parts of our journey has been the willingness to experiment.

Growth doesn’t come from doing the same thing over and over - it comes from trying new approaches, seeing what works, and learning from what doesn’t.

We’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way.

• Some of the ads we ran were complete failures.

• Some of our content didn’t resonate as much as we’d hoped.

But each failure taught us something valuable that we implemented to make it better the next time.

Some of our biggest growth breakthroughs came from ideas that started as experiments.

Not everything will work, but the more you test, the more you’ll learn, and the faster you’ll grow.

To Conclude:

It took a lot of trial, error, and some cash burn to figure all of this out. But we learned.

Now, we’ve developed a system in place that works well not only for us but also for our clients.

In fact, one of our clients was able to start monetizing their newsletter within 1 month of working with us.

I'll share more about this on Saturday. :)

P.S. If you want a tested and proven system to grow your newsletter, just reply with "system."

Hey hey! I want to understand where you’re stuck at your newsletter and figure out how I can help you better.

This can happen in 2 ways -

A group webinar (I'll also explain the complete newsletter creation process here)

A 1:1 call (This will be more focused towards your specific needs)

If that’s something you’re up for, please choose what will be most suitable for you:

P.S. If you are stuck with your newsletter growth at any point, reply to this and I can help you out! 📈