Your ultimate solution for a rainy day

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January 18, 2025 - the day when TikTok was officially banned in the USA.

While TikTok was restored to normal usage just 12 hours later, this shows everything that’s wrong with trusting external platforms.

In the world of productivity there’s a famous quote by David Allen:

Weirdly enough, with just a little tweak this quote perfectly describes the dynamic between generating subscribers and actually owning them:

TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, X, Facebook, and all the other social media platforms are great for generating subscribers and followers but you have to think about them as borrowed audience.

Meaning that if any of these platforms want to ban you from using their apps or a government decides that one of these platforms poses a threat to national security, you’ll lose access to all of your followers.

That’s why your goal should be to generate followers on social platforms and de-platform them to actually create your own audience.

This way, you create an owned audience.

And you do it by converting them into your newsletter.

Companies and governments may impose bans on certain people or apps but the email protocol will always be there, free to use.

If 💩 hits the fan, your email list is your ultimate for a rainy day.

And we don’t have to be so drastic.

What if Google introduces a drastic change to its algorithms and all your SEO efforts stop working?

What if an advertiser pulls out and suddenly CPMs on your videos go down by 70%?

These are things that have already happened.

Your email list is the ultimate doomsday bunker that can’t be messed with and that will be always there.

You might have heard about the concept of 1,000 true fans.

That is 1,000 people who will buy anything you produce.

While no metric will 1:1 translate into true fans, 1,000 people on your email list are far closer to, for example, 1,000 followers on X or 1,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Build your audience on external platforms but translate them (de-platform) into your “owned” audience using email.

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Other resources to help you grow your newsletter

FT head of newsletters on how title quadrupled email subscribers in four years (link)

Sarah Ebner, head of newsletters at the Financial Times, sharing how she approached scaling various newsletters under the FT brand. They run 16 different newsletters - some free, some paid, and other course-based. Sarah helped them scale their subscriber base from 400,000 to 1.6 million. Lots of lesson in this one.

10 most common mistakes newsletter owners make (link)

Let’s be honest, most newsletters suck. They have poor design, horrible open rates, and no direction for growth or monetization. I put together a list of 10 most common mistakes that I see people make when it comes to building and growing their newsletters. Avoid them and you should see the results follow.

Have a side project, have some fun 😉

That’s a wrap!

Thanks for tuning into today’s issue of the Newsletter Navigator.

Quick question before you go…

Thanks!

-Jakub