Hard Times Make Hard People

This was a tough week as growth greatly slowed via Sparkloop, most likely due to my low acceptance rate of referrals. Currently, the criteria I’m looking for is just one single click within the first month or so from a subscriber in the USA. While the USA part isn’t the problem, the clicking is. This message comes loud and clear to me that I need to improve the content of the emails. In the past week, I’ve increased the click rate from 3.5% to 6% on average this week through strategic placements and content curation. I couldn’t be more proud of the growth of this key email metric.

Now that seems like sunshine and rainbows, doesn’t it? Well here comes the bad news. Yesterday morning my own newsletter went to my spam. I wanted to cry when I realized. Without the proper remedies, this could be a death sentence. This is a problem I am actively working to overcome and I’ll give the breakdown over the next few weeks on how I overcome this and what you can do if this happens to you. This is a great example of why this newsletter is called Building While Flying.

How do I plan on overcoming this? For now, I’ve adjusted my welcome automation to ask for the receiver to reply to the email, hoping this will help drive engagement and thus bring emails back out of spam. I added a double opt-in feature through Beehiiv so someone needs to actively confirm their subscription to avoid spam reports. I’ll be watching YouTube videos and reading any content I can to get myself out of this hole. Eliminating the wrong partners on SparkLoop I think will help as well, and by that, I mean making sure those recommending me are within my niche so fewer people complain it’s spam. If you have any knowledge on how to get out of this, please let me know!

Follow me on Twitter for live updates of this in between the weekly email and share this with a friend if they’d find it useful:

Best Internet Content This Week

• OpenAI launched Sora and I’m officially scared for the future

• Tyler Denk shared how Beehiiv can ship new products so often, sign up for that newsletter, it’s been a gem 💎 

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