"Why am I getting this email?" — quick reminder:

You may have signed up on my homepage, for one of my free resources (1KS Roadmap or Mark Manson onboarding templates), or you were referred here by a friend's newsletter. If not, unsubscribe at the bottom — no harm, no foul.

Hey hey Reader,

I think you might find a few resources below interesting (if you write a newsletter, of course)...

FREE Resources by GC⚡

→ The 1KS Roadmap: A Free Course To Your First 1,000 Subscribers

→ Increase opt-ins like a best-selling author (FREE templates)

→ 30 Days of Growth (via Chenell @ Growth In Reverse)

The Custom Onboarding Strategy

Stop treating new subscribers like they all came from the same place.

It's 2025.

Most newsletter operators have no choice but to drive subscribers from multiple channels and platforms.

Gone are the days of 2022/23 when posting on Twitter would automagically send you 100 new subscribers.

Elon and the team made like Tonya Harding's ex and took a baton to our reach. And from the wreckage spawned recommendation networks: SparkLoop, Kit, Beehive. Etc. Recommend other newsletters, get recommended. New growth!🤝

But that wasn't enough. We sought out other channels.

Queue the great LinkedIn migration of the last 18 months. And all the Bluesky hype 6 months ago (anyone still there?).

And now—in what feels like a comeback story—Substack seems to be drawing (back) the masses. The great Creator herd is in search of new plains to graze upon. It's not that Substack's grass is greener—it's that there is grass at all.

Substack holds the promise of yet another Recommendations network AND a social media algorithm (Substack Notes) ripe for ~~exploitation~~ grazing.

How To Handle Diversified Subscriber Streams

Let me get to my point before this turns into an old-man-shouting-at-the-clouds rant. Too late?

Here's my point:

We've diversified our traffic streams more than ever. Subscribers are joining newsletters from all directions. We need to treat them accordingly, when possible.

Why?

Because a subscriber who reads your social post and actively subscribes (i.e. an organic subscriber)

—is a lot different—

than one who passively hits 'Subscribe' on a Recommendations pop-up widget that includes your newsletter—and five others 🤦‍♂️

Learn From My Mistake

I learned this the hard way when I took a newsletter hiatus.

I stopped publishing and promoting my newsletter for about a year. But Kit's recommendations (the Creator Network) helped me gain over 1,700 subscribers while my newsletter sat dormant and I did nothing.

But when I returned from my hiatus, I hit send.

And quickly learned why it's really important to treat subscriber onboarding in a more customized way.

Or else your subscribers are gonna churn. Churn is great—if you’re making butter. Not so much with new subscribers.

Here's what I did, and the results.

3-min read >>

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Your newsletter strategy look like this?

Keep throwing spaghetti at the wall til something sticks...

Stop wasting spaghetti your time.

Book a 1:1 newsletter strategy session and walk away with a clear plan to grow, monetize, and scale — from someone who's done it and helped dozens of others do the same.

Take Grant—a recent 1:1 client of mine.

Grant was doing a lot of the right things with his newsletter.
He had over 140k newsletter subscribers.

But he needed an outside perspective—especially when it came to newsletter revenue.

So he booked a 60-min Newsletter Strategy Call with me.

I shed some light on strategies he hadn't considered with concrete examples and Grant has hit the ground running 💪