Morgan Lavoie

speaker

350 appearances 16 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard May 2025

Morgan Lavoie’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

So I thought that I could make it with my newsletter. And I could try to do one thing every week that would help me live a greener life and talk about why it worked and how it worked. But Jason is totally right. My idea is too complicated. And it actually used to be even more complicated. I was going to include interviews with people solving climate issues at scale.

I'm definitely not doing that anymore. I've been thinking a lot about what Jason said since we spoke. And again, he is totally right and his advice is really solid. But I am going to inexplicably still try to do the unmanageable thing, the thing that he said would make me burn out.

And that's because I'm not thinking about doing these climate experiments, as he called them, just to write about them in a newsletter. I want to do them anyway because I think I should be more conscious about my footprint. So I actually think that writing about it and starting this newsletter will help me make some real change in my life and hopefully in others too.

But I am going to forget putting in interviews and some of the other section and segment ideas because I should try to decomplicate this workflow for myself. He's totally right. This conversation left me feeling really excited. So once I felt like I had my idea workshopped, it was time to make the thing. So this is when I talked to Alyssa Doolin. Again, she manages the creator growth team at KIT.

I asked her all of my technical questions, like how do I protect myself from being sent to spam? How do I get people to open my emails? Oh, and importantly, I'm not a celebrity, so how do I actually get people to find my newsletter? She helped me out with all of these questions. Here she is. I have some questions for you, Alyssa, but my biggest worry is that I just don't know what I don't know.

So I actually want to start by asking you generally, what are some important best practices when starting a newsletter?

Yeah, you just touched on so many things that I want to circle back to and double click on. But you mentioned the user experience and how you're welcoming people. And that reminded me of the fact that for the newsletters that I subscribe to, when I first subscribed to them, I did get like a welcome email. Is that something that you recommend creators have? Yeah.

Okay, interesting. And so that is something that would potentially help my email not be flagged as spam. Yes.

Okay, great. So say I am sending out my first email and I've asked some friends to subscribe. So I have some people that are on the list already, but I haven't sent anything yet. Is there anything I should be doing for the very first newsletter that I send out that will increase the probability that my email doesn't just automatically go to a spam or junk folder? Yeah.

It's great to hear because I have sort of been sitting here thinking that I don't have a big list to start. Like I'm not going to get a lot of people to sign up initially. I just know that to be true. And I have been sort of taking myself thinking that that's a bad thing, but it's nice to hear that there are some kind of good things about it too. So that's really good to know.

Some other things that you mentioned around user experience is like, Length and cadence, how often are your subscribers going to be hearing from you? These are the things that I'm thinking through right now, like all of these little decisions around how long the newsletter is going to be and what is the cadence and should I have headings and different sections and things like that.

Are there any lessons from Kit's top writers about what works? Yeah.

Okay, great. That's really helpful. I know another thing that people look at really closely and want to make sure they optimize for is a good open rate. Do you have any tips on getting a good open rate?

That's really helpful. And I alluded to this before, but I am not a celebrity. I am not Tim Ferriss. I I don't have a big audience of people that I know are going to subscribe to the newsletter. And so I effectively, in order to grow it, need to kind of get strangers to discover it. Like I don't have an audience that I'm tapping into. And so how do I do that?

Like how do I grow a newsletter beyond what my own personal reach or network is? Yeah.

So lead magnets, that's something I'm familiar with. I don't know if I've ever heard of someone doing an email challenge or a newsletter challenge. What would that look like? Like what's an example of something someone has done before?

And I know that another tool that Kit has, because I... So I'm going to start my newsletter on Kit. I have not sent anything out yet, but I did create an account. And I know that there is like tech within the platform to cross promote newsletters. So I could recommend, do like a recommendation swap with another writer on Kit.

And I think the way that this would work, and correct me if I'm wrong, is if like... Someone subscribes to my newsletter and I'm recommending some, you know, let's say Jason's newsletter that when they subscribe to mine, they would get a pop up that's like you might like or like this author recommends or something like that. Do you have any sense of best practices around that?

Because I can see like. it being a really good idea to just try and get a recommendation from someone with a really big audience. But is it perhaps more important to work with someone who's like writing in the same genre that you're writing in? Or like, what are some of the considerations for using a swap tool like that?

Okay, great. That's really helpful. And in terms of like, you know, because in a best case scenario, I would recommend a newsletter and they would recommend me back. If I recommend a newsletter, does the writer of that newsletter see that on their end?

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