Over the 2 years of publishing Deep Dives, I’ve shared hundreds of different ways the biggest newsletter creators are growing their newsletters.
Some of them reached massive heights by doing the unscalable things:
- Justin Moore DM’d every new follower about his newsletter. Now he earns 7 figures with his newsletter.
- Codie Sanchez appeared on hundreds of podcasts. She has over 800k subscribers.
- Dan Koe tested and experimented for years on his way to over 2.6M followers.
- Ali Abouelatta experimented with 39 different growth strategies to reach his first 1000 subscribers (now over 60k).
But not everyone has the kind of time or patience to do things that don’t scale well.
So today I’m sharing some newsletter creators who were able to focus their energy and optimize their growth efforts.
In case you missed it…
This is Part 3 of a 3-part series sharing some of the best optimizations we’ve seen over the past 2 years of researching the biggest newsletter creators.
Find Part 1 about optimizing traffic here: 6 Ways To Turn More Viewers Into Subscribers.
Find Part 2 about optimizing engagement here: How The Biggest Newsletters Optimize For Engagement
Let’s get into it.
How Tom Alder Optimizes Growth via LinkedIn
Tom Alder started growing his Strategy Breakdowns newsletter before publishing the first edition.
And by launch day, he’d amassed 5,000 subscribers!
Most newsletter creators send their first edition to maybe a dozen friends or colleagues.
Tom was obviously thinking about growth differently once he decided to launch Strategy Breakdowns.
Not only that, his newsletter has grown to over 55,000 subscribers in a little over a year.
So what’s his secret?
LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Growth Tips 🌵
74% of Tom’s subscribers in the first 6 months came from LinkedIn, and he’s shared a number of tactical tips in interviews and on his own website.
Here are some of the tactical strategies he’s used to grow his LinkedIn audience.
1. Outbound Engagement
For around half an hour before you post, make sure you’re commenting on larger creators posts in your niche.
Tom actually said this was the single best growth hack:
He said at a minimum he tries to do 15-20 outbound comments a day, although I have a feeling that some days it’s double or more than that.
But comment at least that many times before you publish your own post. Think of it like giving before you expect anything in return.
2. The First Hour After Posting
The first hour right after you post is the most important time.
Tom told Dylan Redekop that if a post gets ~100 reactions in the first hour, it will likely end up with around 500 or so reactions after 48-72 hours.
If you get around 200+ reactions, you can pretty reliably expect the post to go a little viral (2,000+ reactions).
3. Engage Like a Real Person
This one goes for almost any social platform I can think of. You need to actually be engaging with other people that comment or like the post.
This is social media after all 🙂
Tom makes sure to engage with all comments that come in within the first 30 to 60 minutes after posting.
After that, he’ll take a break and come back later in the day to continue engaging with the comments.
4. Add Multiple Comments
Including comments on your own post with bonus information to drive more engagement. You can add things like:
- Include a bonus item in this space. If you’re posting about the 10 best ways to do X, you can include an 11th in the comments.
- Quote by a famous person about that topic
- More insights or even a picture of you doing the thing you talked about
There are a ton of possibilities here. In my opinion, this strategy is starting to feel a little overused, so you’ll want to put more effort into what you’re including there and do it well.
But it still seems to be working. Here’s a recent post of Tom’s where he does this:
5. Adding a Call to Action
Including a link in your post really decreases the reach of your post, and Tom estimates it hurts the reach of your post by 75%.
You want to optimize the first hour for engagement, keeping in mind those metrics we talked about above, but after it gets a bit of traction you can include a link.
It will still decrease your reach, but at that point, you’ve hopefully already hit “escape velocity” with your post which will negate the downsides of editing the post and including a link.
6. Don’t Be the First to Comment
Tom said that LinkedIn also penalizes your post if you’re the first to comment on that post.
After 10 minutes, you can add a comment with a newsletter link, after someone else has hopefully commented as well.
7. Converting LinkedIn Engagement → Newsletter Subscribers
An audience on social is great, but email is better. And Tom has been able to get his followers to become newsletter subscribers.
Shortly after starting Strategy Breakdowns, Tom had a few posts that went insanely viral.
This one took him from 5,000 subscribers to over 7,640 subscribers.
That’s over 2,600 subscribers…from one post. I don’t know about you, but I’d love some newsletter growth like that.
However, not all viral posts gain subscribers.
Sure you can post “10 websites that are so valuable they should be illegal” (please don’t), but if your content is not related to that topic, it’s purely a dopamine game.
Quality over quantity wins when you’re trying to build an email list.
How Harry Dry Used “Growth Loops”
Harry Dry grew his Marketing Examples newsletter to over 130k subscribers. And he’s tried a lot of strategies to grow it—but one super simple growth lever stood out to me.
He calls it “Growth Loops” — and it’s so simple, yet so genius.
I even wrote a whole GIR edition about it.
So how does it work?
Think of all your published content as an ecosystem.
You can leverage different content “locations” (website, newsletter, social media, etc.) for different purposes, bouncing readers around from one spot to another.
Why do this?
Well, Harry knows his newsletter readers have already “converted”. They’re raving fans—and who better to share your newsletter than your raving fans, right?
But why force them to only engage in one place? Instead, Harry shares his content all over and lets them engage with his content where it feels most natural to them.
Since Twitter/X is (or was) Harry’s main driver for new subscriber growth, he gets his subscribers to promote his newsletter FOR him on Twitter.
Smart, right?
How Harry Does It
Here’s an example. Harry sends out an email about how to make your marketing “realer”.
Instead of wasting a newsletter click on his website, Harry shares a link in his newsletter that links over to a tweet thread.
He asks his readers (the “raving fans”) to ‘like’ his thread about that post they just read.
If you noticed, that email was sent out at 1:53 pm on July 24, 2020.
A few hours before, he had published a Twitter thread about this exact topic:
So what happens?
- Readers click the link and like the tweet thread
- Which signals the algorithm that these posts are valuable.
- Which puts it in front of more Twitter users
- Resulting in more impressions, likes, comments, and shares.
- This inevitably leads to more Twitter followers
- Which leads to more newsletter subscribers.
(And Harry’s not the only smart creator in the room doing this. George Mack does the same thing with his newsletter and Twitter posts.)
Most creators send everything back to their newsletter, and they miss out on this additional layer of traffic.
It’s a big growth loop.
And it’s so obvious that he was successful with this strategy.
If you look back at the growth timeline, you can see that as his Twitter is growing, his newsletter is growing at the same rate.
Compare that to other people who have huge Twitter followings—but only a small percentage of email subscribers.
They’re missing a huge opportunity to grow their email list with their Twitter audience.
But the opposite also applies!
In fact, you should strongly consider this Growth Loop lever if your newsletter audience is bigger than your social audience.
Aakash Gupta Optimized for the Internal Share 🗣️
In May 2023, Aakash stumbled on a new “growth hack” for his newsletter.
He wrote a piece called “The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding” which went a little viral for him in terms of readers.
Aakash figured out that a product manager from Meta had read the piece and must have shared it around with their internal teams.
And the only way to read the full guide? Become a paying subscriber. All of a sudden, he had an influx of new paid subscribers from Meta.
These big tech companies have huge learning and development budgets, so they can easily afford a $150/year subscription to the newsletter.
A lightbulb went off for him.
“Writing more pieces like that that can potentially go viral within these big tech companies with learning and development budgets is my number one goal.”
– Aakash Gupta
Now he goes back through the pieces that drove the most paid subscriptions and re-reads them to see how he can replicate that in the future.
He started reverse engineering how to replicate that and started creating content based solely on the goal of getting product managers in bigger organizations to share it with their colleagues.
Double down on what’s working.
This builds in a great flywheel as well, Aakash created this image to represent how it works:
The part not pictured is his topic selection research, which leads to even more referrals in-house at larger companies.
Super, super smart on his part.
Optimized Newsletter Growth: Doing the right things better
This edition could be super long if I included everything I’ve covered in the past (another great example off the top of my head is how Yossi Levi Built Content Growth Loops).
My biggest takeaway when reviewing these growth optimization strategies is this:
Successful newsletter growth doesn’t happen by accident—it’s the result of intentional, repeatable actions.
Tom Alder’s mastery of LinkedIn engagement, Harry Dry’s clever “Growth Loops,” and countless other creators show us that focusing on specific, high-impact levers can yield extraordinary results.
It’s tempting to try “all the things.” But you really don’t need to do everything at once.
Pick one strategy that resonates with your strengths or aligns with where your audience already is, and execute it well.
Growth isn’t about doing more — it’s about doing the right things better.
