In the early days of writing a newsletter, it can be challenging to get traction. And even as you grow sometimes it’s beneficial to go back and revisit some methods that worked early on that you’ve abandoned.
One of those things for me is cross promotions, which can be a great way to get quality subscribers to your newsletter.
These go by a variety of names (“swaps”, “cross marketing”, etc.) and can even look different depending on how you set them up.
But in short, you and another brand or creator are promoting each other’s work.
Cross promotions can be hit or miss, but if you do them well I think the results are pretty darn good for the work you put in.
It’s also one growth lever I’ve seen used again and again with newsletter creators. And that might be because it can be extremely effective when done well.
Quality Over Quantity
Before we get too deep here, I want to share a caveat to be aware of with cross promotions.
This is about building quality relationships with people whose work you know is good and would personally recommend to a friend (because that’s exactly what you’re doing).
It can be easy to try and optimize each part of these and just pump out more and more of them, but I’d advise against it.
The key here is quality, not quantity.
Instead of finding 100 people to partner with, find 3-5 who are perfect for your audience and optimize those.
And if you find someone to partner with where your audiences gel and you both get great results? Fantastic! Do another cross promotion in a few months.
Or jump on each other’s podcasts or share your information in other ways.
Quantity Can Lead to Issues
When you optimize for quantity, you’re going to run into problems.
I’ve gotten cold emails from people who run newsletters that aren’t even closely related to mine, and you can tell they are just emailing everyone in a database.
Don’t do that.
First, you’re going to annoy people (like me) which isn’t good for the “relationship” side of things.
Second, and more importantly, you are going to erode your audience’s trust in you. Even if you do get some people to say yes to cold emails, it’s probably not going to be the people you actually want to do a cross promo with.
Maybe the content isn’t aligned (or even good), and you’re going to ruin the trust you’ve built with your audience.
Which, as a creator or someone with a personal brand, is quite literally the worst thing you can do.
Okay, so how do we do this well?
Creators Running Cross Promos
Let’s look at some examples from past deep dives so you can see cross promotions or swaps in action.
Codie Sanchez has done a number of these cross promotions with people she’s built relationships with over the years.
She didn’t do this a ton in the beginning, but later on in her journey Codie ran cross promotions with large newsletters like Sahil Bloom, Noah Kagan, and Ali Abdaal.
All of these had over 100-150k subscribers, and likely brought in thousands of new subscribers for her.
The smart thing she did with these is to give other people a snippet of what to include in their newsletter promotion. She doesn’t just leave it to them to guess.
Here are two examples of a promo she did with Ali Abdaal and Noah Kagan.
On the left is the Ali Abdaal cross promo, and the right was with Noah Kagan. You can tell they were given some “talking points” to go off of – which is smart and I’ll share more about later.
Some other creators who have done these?
- Ali Abouelatta shared that he got 465 subscribers from running cross promotions in the first eight months of the newsletter.
- Michael Houck has run cross promotions with other newsletters whose content was aligned with his audience.
- Alex Garcia has done interesting swaps with other creators like Pat Walls.
So we know what not to do, and have seen other people doing these, but how do you find cross promotion opportunities?
Where to Find Cross Promotions
The list for this is endless, but here are some of the things I’ve done in the past.
In the DMs
As you’re posting on social and finding a community there, the people interacting there and also growing a newsletter are great candidates for cross promotions.
These are often great partners to work with because you’ve seen what they write about and if they’re actually offering value or just trying to game an algorithm.
Lettergrowth
This is a website you can use to sign up and raise your hand saying you’re open to cross promotions. You share how many subscribers you have and what you write about so you can find people with similar audiences.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work – this is also the place I get terrible cold emails and spam from, so enter at your own risk.
Recommendations Platforms
You can also find people who might have similar audiences by checking out the network of creators on whatever ESP you’re using.
ConvertKit has the Creator Network, Beehiiv has Boosts, and Substack has Recommendations. You can go through these and search for your niche or industry and find other creators who might be open to a swap like this.
Niche Communities
If you’re a part of a Slack or Discord group for your industry, there might be other creators in there you can collaborate with.
We also just started running cross promotions inside of Growth In Reverse Pro, and I’ve already seen a few “in the wild” which is super cool.
Best Practices for Cross Promotions
There are a few best practices I have for running cross promotions.
Tracking Results
If you’ve taken the time to identify someone to work with and get everything set up, don’t miss the tracking side of things.
You can include UTM parameters to your link so the subscribers you get from that person are tracked and you’re not just guesstimating if it worked or not.
Instead of sharing growthinreverse.com, I’d ask people to use a link like:
- growthinreverse.com/?ref=theirnewsletter name
- growthinreverse.com/?utm_source=theirnewsletter&utm_medium=email
That way it shows up in Google Analytics and I can see approximately how many people came from that and if it was worthwhile to do another one in the future.
Adjacent vs Direct
When you’re looking for people to run cross promotions with, don’t just look for people who have the exact same audience and are addressing them in the same way.
If you write about real estate, don’t just look for other real estate people to cross promote with.
Maybe you can find someone who talks about home inspections, or flooring installation (as that’s often something people in real estate replace).
That might not be the best example, but finding adjacent audiences is perfect.
Build Systems
As you start doing more of these types of swaps, it can be smart to create a “blurb” that others can include in their newsletter. What do you write about, why should people read it, etc.
When you write the “promotion” for the other person, you have some control to make sure they’re including information you know gets people to subscribe.
I like to create multiple lengths of these in case they generally put you in their sponsor slot, or if it’s just a one-liner.
Due Diligence
Before you get too excited about a specific partner for a cross promotion, see if you can do a little due diligence first.
What do I mean by this? Gather some information on their audience and how “hot” it is.
You’ll learn pretty fast that some people out there have a “Flat” audience. They might seem great from the outside: “Oh my gosh, they have 10,000 email subscribers!”
When in reality, their open rate is 20% and no one clicks their emails.
I’ve done cross promotions with people who had 3x the list size I did, and I got literally 0 subscribers (while sending at least 200 people their way). Not cool.
I’ve also done cross promos where the person had a much smaller audience but sent over 100 subscribers my way.
What I look for now:
- List size
- Open rate
- Do they have an audience on social that is active (this isn’t a perfect measure, but can show you how much people interact with their stuff)
You can also go searching around for their sponsorship kit if they have one and see what kind of engagement they get. If they’re on Passionfroot, you can usually get some data there.
Sometimes their sponsor pages give away valuable click data so you can see how many clicks a sponsor gets, and estimate from there.
But the other thing you can do is just ask them how many clicks their cross promotions usually get. Simple and straightforward 🙂
Do You Need a Big Email List?
In my opinion, you can do a version of these swaps as early as 100 or so subscribers.
However, I think it’s smart to wait until you’ve nailed your style and *who* your writing is for. Otherwise, you’re going to have lackluster results.
If you aren’t getting people replying to your emails saying “I loved this!” or sharing it without you asking, I think there’s some work to do.
One of the best practices for running cross promotions is to find people with similar audiences to yours. And if you don’t even know who you’re writing for yet, that’s going to be challenging and ineffective.
On top of that, if you go out and do a bunch of cross promos before you have this nailed down, the people you’re doing those swaps with likely won’t have great results either, and you might hurt that relationship.
I realize this is kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, but it’s important to focus on the content and audience before trying a bunch of growth strategies.
Cross Promotions Can Build Relationships
If you’ve read anything on this site before, you know that I’m all about building relationships with other people throughout the creator journey.
And running cross promotions with others can be a great way to kick off a relationship, or deepen one you’ve been building for a while.
I’ve seen so many people in this space quit their newsletter and go do something else. Maybe they no longer have the audience, but you know what they do have? The relationships they’ve built. The people they’ve connected with.
Businesses can evolve or disappear. But if you’ve focused on building friendships and relationships, you’re going to be miles ahead in that next thing then you would be if you started again from nothing.
