Alyssa Dulin

speaker

49 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Alyssa Dulin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · How to Make a Newsletter Your Career's Secret Weapon · 17 Jan 2025 podcast

Can I get some feedback on my newsletter idea?

Please.

Yes, this is a great question. Starting with your subscribers that are coming onto your list, remembering that these are all humans. I know sometimes we see email addresses and we are trying to get the biggest list as possible. Sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle that like, okay, these are real humans. How do I take care of them as my subscribers?

And so I think first electing those subscribers, doing so in a way that's consent-based, making sure people want to be on your list and not trying to grow your list in a way that's all about growth. Sometimes that can get us in tricky situations where we're like, what if I run a giveaway for a Peloton if you give me your email address? And then it's like, well...

Those people just wanted a Peloton. They don't really want your newsletter. How do we get them excited about your newsletter? And then once they're on the list, what's the experience? Are you welcoming them? Do they know what to expect? How often are they hearing from you? And all of those things cover a lot of email deliverability issues where emails might start going to spam.

you're having trouble. Some of that can get into technical weeds, but a lot of times it comes down to the humans, the subscribers. Are they happy on your email list? Do they want to be there or are they marking you as spam? And then that's causing some issues.

I do. I do recommend it for a few different reasons. But one of them is just that we have some short attention spans, a lot of us do. And we're signing up for things and we're forgetful. And so if you don't have a welcome email, someone might sign up to your list after they see something you've posted somewhere or they're excited about something they've seen.

And then a week goes by, they've lived a whole life in a week. And then they get your email and they're like, what is this? Who is this person? I've forgotten this name. I don't know. I didn't sign up for this. Marcus Bam. So that welcome email is a great way to right out of the gate. Someone just signed up. Welcome them. Remind them, hi, here's who I am. Here's what to expect.

I'm going to be sending you X, Y, Z over X amount of time. And another little pro tip in that welcome email, ask them to reply to you. It boosts your sender reputation and will help with deliverability. Because that helps the algorithms that like Gmail and Microsoft have think, oh, this is a wanted email.

It's kind of a one-to-one email where they're emailing each other instead of seeing you as this bulk sender who's just blasting out emails to a bunch of people at once.

So let me know if this is getting too deep, but essentially your subscribers are sending signals to the mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft that tell them whether this is wanted email or whether it's spam email. And those signals are replying. That's a really positive signal. Opening the email, positive. Clicking, positive. So that's all great and you want to optimize for those.

Some negative signals are not opening emails after time and time again you've sent them emails. Or the most negative one, marking a message as spam. So you want to avoid those signals and optimize for those positive ones where it's showing engagement.

That's a great question. I think I would do exactly what you're doing, which is starting small with people who you know or they've signed up to be there. And then you should be in a really healthy place. And then from there, if you grow your email list with, again, people who want to be there, then I wouldn't expect to see any issues.

Where I see some issues sometimes is if someone starts that very first send off with a larger list that's maybe gone cold. You haven't emailed these people in a while. You might be like, well, this is from my other side hustle I had two years ago that I kind of abandoned. I collected an email list back then, but now I'm starting a new newsletter. Let's send them this new newsletter.

That's when I see things start to go wrong and that very first send does not go well. So again, I think as long as you're starting on a really healthy starting point with people who... want to be there, a smaller list, and then you ramp up slowly, then you should be good to go.

Definitely. Yes. Everyone has their own take on this and there isn't a one size fits all. But what we can learn from the top senders is that consistency is key. You know, we all have heard that before. Making sure people know what to expect. So I'm thinking of like Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday is one of our most successful newsletters. Everyone knows you're going to get it on Friday.

It has the same format every week. There aren't a lot of surprises and it's consistently great content. So whatever you choose, I would just keep it consistent, whether it's a monthly roundup or it's a weekly digest, whatever it may be, just stick to it. And then when I think of our top performers, they keep consistent formats, like I just mentioned, making it easily skimmable too.

You don't want someone to open it up to a wall of text or a huge list of links. When I think about Tim Ferriss or Sahil Bloom or James Clear's weekly newsletter, I think of the fact that, again, they keep their format consistent every single time. And it's really easy to see the heading. There's some information below, maybe a call to action with a button or an image. And then another heading.

And then you can kind of pick and choose where you want to give your attention. So you don't have to read the full newsletter if it's not all related to you. So those would be my two top recommendations are consistency in the frequency and then consistency in the layout and making it really easily skimmable.

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