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Growth

Growth Project: List Your Newsletter on Directories

Bruce Pinchbeck
Bruce Pinchbeck
Time: Variable but can be done by one person. (30 minutes to 10 hours)
Difficulty: Easy
Focus: Subscriber Growth

Looking to share your newsletter with new readers? Share it with us! Let us know if you have a great newsletter we should be reading.

What is a newsletter directory? 

A newsletter directory lists and filters newsletters by interest and category. By listing your newsletter across these various websites, you can increase your potential discoverability passively. 

Whether you are just starting or your newsletter has thousands of subscribers, growing your newsletter isn't an easy task. Fortunately, there are tons of newsletter directories out there that can help you facilitate growth.

While sharing on social and within closed communities is a great way to reach a new audience should be your bread and butter, newsletter directories offer a new way to increase discoverability. Directories are similar to classifieds, where they attract interested readers, which is a valuable discovery opportunity. Taking a little bit of effort now can score you a quick win and help you become more discoverable for future readers.

What is the benefit of newsletter directories?

These directories are databases for readers to find newsletters on the topics that interest them most. You can expect a few things beyond new subscribers, including: 

  • Link equity 
    Submitting your newsletter to directories adds much-needed SEO value to your site in the form of link equity, which means that when another website links to yours, they pass on ranking value.  
  • SEO
    One of the most crucial growth avenues for any newsletter; however, for most people, it takes months or years to build up sufficient backlinks to rank for popular search phrases, which is time you don't have. Think of newsletter directories as a fast track to boosting your SEO value. By submitting your newsletter to more directories, you can increase your link equity quickly and easily. 
  • Social boost 
    Many of the directories share new entries on their social media accounts. While it's not much, any bit of extra exposure gives you a wider potential audience to discover your newsletter. 
  • Passive growth 
    When you submit your newsletter through directories, you can receive passive newsletter subscriber growth. That means you can increase your subscribers without any additional activity on your part. 

Tips:

  1. Gather up your newsletter info into one doc and folder for easy copy/paste. Most of the directories require the same information. Keep it ready to go.  The most common info will be logos (and banner images), brief descriptions (tweet length), demographics, subject category, link to subscribe.
  2. Consider handing this work off to a junior employee or virtual assistant. If you have your information ready to go, you can work with talented folks on Fiverr or Upwork to handle this data entry. 
  3. Do a little additional research to see if your niche audience has it's own specific directory; they're popping up fast, so it's entirely possible.

List of newsletter directories 

While it may take a couple of hours, we recommend submitting your newsletter to all of these sites to see the best results. 

If you're interested in finding ways to boost your revenue with your existing email newsletters using self-service newsletter advertising, we'd love to speak with you.