Podcasting Meets Newsletters: A Winning Strategy for Creators

Our guest today has been in the podcast space since 2017, and she runs the podcast recommendation newsletter, Earbuds Podcast Collective. Welcome, Ariel Nissenblatt.

Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

I'm so excited to have you here. I think this topic is very interesting and not one that people really think about usually.

I'm curious how you got into the space of mixing podcasts and newsletters or having a newsletter for your podcast.

Yeah, so the first thing I did was start a newsletter. I had no desire to start a podcast in 2017 when I started this newsletter.

I really, at the time thought that there were enough podcasts, and that was 2017. So you can imagine how things have changed since then. But it is, I really thought, I love listening to podcasts.

I don't necessarily need to create one. So I just want to have this newsletter available as a place that people can go to to discover podcasts to listen to.

So I started that in 2017, still running it. It goes out every Sunday. I have since started a few podcasts, mostly about the podcast industry.

And the newsletter points to the podcast, the podcasts point to the newsletter, so on and so forth until forever. And what I believe now is that for me, it's a little bit different of a case than for most people who have podcasts and newsletters.

Because your podcast, not yours per se, Sarah, but other people who have a podcast, maybe you have a podcast about climate change and you have a newsletter that points to that podcast about climate change, that's a little bit different than having a podcast about podcasts.

But if you have a newsletter about climate change and that newsletter points to your podcast and you have a podcast about climate change, and that points to your newsletter, you kind of got this cycle of people coming in through one and discovering the other. And that can be a really great way to get people into your content orbit.

And I think that it is very smart for people to be at least capturing email addresses, not necessarily starting a weekly newsletter, but getting email addresses when people visit their website or having a signup form in the show, notes of your episode, or, you know, there's a few other places you could put it, like the link in your bio, you could have a link tree or something like that on social platforms.

Just because when you are podcasting and people subscribe to your feed on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher or not Stitcher anymore or Pocket Casts or Good Pods or whatever it is, you don't actually know who those people are unless they volunteer to identify themselves. Unless they leave you a rating and a review and they say, hello, I am Arielle Nissenblatt and I'm leaving this rating in review.

But one way to actually definitely be in touch with them directly is by asking for their email address. Of course you have to ask them for their email address. They have to say yes.

Then they have to opt in probably one more time, because you hopefully have the double opt in situation going on. But it just means that those people are so engaged with you that they've gone through all of those steps to receive correspondence from you.

So hopefully they really want to be with you.

Yeah. So I. I know one challenge of course, as a podcaster is finding a way to communicate with your listeners.

Whereas like, let's say YouTube or blog or social media, they can comment. But with podcasting, yes, there are a few apps that you can do that, but for the most part, not so much.

So obviously having some sort of lead magnet to capture their email address, like you said. But do you find that having the newsletter in and of itself makes a good lead magnet on your podcast? Like saying, hey, go subscribe to my newsletter.

What are your thoughts on that as using it as a lead magnet?

It can be if you are taking the time to make it a good newsletter that is actually worth somebody's time. Right.

I think a lot of people think they need to start a newsletter for their podcast and each issue of the newsletter is just new episode of the podcast out now and then a button to go and listen to it. But that's not enticing me in any way. That doesn't give me any new information that I wouldn't get otherwise.

I think the way I look at it is your podcast should be so great that if nobody ever knew you had a newsletter, they would just be happy getting the podcast. And your newsletter should be so great that if they didn't know you had a podcast, they would just love your newsletter.

And eventually, you know, over time, you can start cross pollinating and trying to get somebody from one to the other. But I think for the most part, you do need to have that content speak for itself as if that's the only thing that exists.

Yeah, I agree with that. So when it comes to crafting a newsletter, what do you recommend as far as different?

I mean, I assume that you should reference your latest podcast episode, but that shouldn't be all, obviously, like you're saying.

So then should the newsletter be about like the main points that were in the episode, or should it talk about stuff outside of the episode itself as well.

Yeah, I always think it's funny. I'll give advice on this, but it really is an individual situation.

So I'll try to give general advice, and then everybody who's listening should try to figure out what this means for them. But I think let's go back to the climate change example.

If you have a podcast where each episode you're interviewing somebody about climate change in their community and how they're combating it, that's great. And the conversations that you have on the podcast are great. Maybe you have a section at the end that has tangible takeaways.

Maybe what you do with those tangible takeaways is that's how you anchor your newsletter. So you say, this week on the podcast, we spoke with Sarah St. John about Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. And here's some ways that Sarah St.

John is fighting back against Hurricane Katrina. This is where my brain is going.

And then, you know, we had five bullet points for your involvement in the cleanup efforts of Hurricane Katrina and what other people can do to take on those responsibilities. That might be something useful to see written out, right? Yes. You can imagine it when somebody says, number one, Sarah St. John, what did you do?

Number two, number three, number four, number five. But then also, let's have them written out. Maybe you can convert that into a card that you can share on social.

And maybe there's also visual components like images and videos that go along with it.

So I think what's great about a newsletter is that it allows you to have a visual element, a visual component to your podcast that doesn't exist otherwise because your podcast is either audio only or video, but maybe not super complicated video. Maybe it's just talking heads. So newsletters, I would find something to anchor each issue on.

And it could be, again, if you have a climate change podcast and a climate change newsletter to go along with that podcast, maybe each issue of the newsletter is instead of here's the latest episode that touches on Sarah's experience with Hurricane Katrina. Instead, maybe it's just Hurricane Katrina. And then the podcast talks about Hurricane Katrina and the newsletter talks about Hurricane Katrina.

And yes, maybe you say, also, for more information, go check out the podcast.

But I think ultimately where people miss the mark is does it matter to you where people are consuming your content or that people are consuming your content? Right.

So if somebody subscribes to your newsletter and never discovers your podcast, but they respond to you all the time, they're part of your Patreon, whatever, does it matter that they're not your Podcast listener or does it? It's kind of up to you to decide. Like, where do you want your listeners going? Where are you getting the most bang for your buck?

If they are worth dollar amounts to you? If, if you have advertisers sponsor your podcast but not your newsletter, then yes, you might want to bring people over to the podcast.

But if not, if you're just building an audience, it's probably just a good idea to build that audience.

Yeah, that's a good point. That in the end, as long as they're consuming your content, it really doesn't matter where.

So now the newsletter, do you recommend having that as part of like using whatever your email service provider is or using some other platform like Substack, Beehive, something like that?

Yes, I, I highly recommend using something like mailchimp or Substack or Beehive. I use mailchimp for about seven years and then I switched to Beehive this year.

I switched because I like how easy the analytics are to dive into and also I like what it looks like, how customizable it is. And they have a really cool advertising platform where you can sign up to advertise other newsletters and you get paid per subscriber acquisition.

So I think that's a fun way to grow your newsletter and to potentially make some money. Kind of helps offset the cost of the newsletter platform in and of itself.

I do think it's important for you to have a professional looking place that somebody can go to sign up for your newsletter. So if you were to say, like, I'm going to be emailing you from ariellnissenblatt gmail.com Every week, that's probably not super professional.

But instead if you go to Newsletter Earbuds Audio, you can find a really nice landing page where you can check out all my. My entire archive of seven plus years.

You can use the search function to look up any word ever that might have appeared in one of my newsletters and then you can find an issue on that and then you can also subscribe and we also have a blog and there's a lot going on there.

So I do recommend that as soon as possible, even if it doesn't look super fancy, make yourself a landing page, whether it's on mailchimp or on Beehive or on Substack, that somebody can go to get more information about your newsletter and to subscribe to your newsletter.

Yeah, because I'm using sendfox for my regular email service provider. I was using Mailerlite and I'm looking at Kit, formerly Convertkit.

But yeah, I was just curious about that, like using a, a platform that's specifically designed for newsletters versus like just broadcasted email campaigns.

Yeah, I think what I like about these newsletter like Substack and Beehive, they're a lot more community oriented. You can like, you can comment, you can restack.

A lot of the time there's built in community engagement tools so that you can interact with your subscribers and that your subscribers can interact with you. I like that a lot. Mailchimp is more. It's better for commerce. It's better for.

If you're selling something, they have really nice looking buttons and campaigns that are meant to convert. But if you want somebody to just read and see you as a thought leader and get value out of what you're writing, that's great.

Yeah, so I do use substack, but like, I don't know, I've been doing weird things like I'll have a blog post that then I purpose into a substack, into a LinkedIn, LinkedIn article, whatever. What are your thoughts on using the same content in multiple places like that?

It depends if your audience is subscribed to all of those different places you don't want people to see.

Like if you put out a podcast episode about Sarah's experience at cleaning up Hurricane Katrina and then you basically read that blog post as your podcast episode, the people who follow you everywhere are going to be like, that's a waste of my time. Unless you're super explicit and you say, by the way, this is my podcast is a read along to my newsletter.

So if you receive the newsletter, but you'd rather hear me talk about it, here's that if you want more information, I'm about to be a guest on this person's podcast to talk about my experience in more depth or something like that.

I think you probably want to have reasons, like I said before, for if somebody were to discover your podcast on their own, that would be all they need. If somebody were to discover your newsletter on their own, that would be all they need. So I think it's a balance there.

Yeah, I mean I'm not doing it in the sense of like reading my podcast, but like when it comes to the written content, I usually use the same content for blog substack and LinkedIn.

Yeah, I think as long as you're localizing it to each of those things.

Yeah.

Great. Yeah.

Okay.

I think it just shows that like there's a theme for this week and somebody who follows you in one place might see it in all. In somebody who follows you in all three places might see it everywhere.

But then there's probably a few people who only subscribe to you in one of those places. And that's great.

Yeah. And so now when you have a newsletter, should that subscriber list be separated out from your regular email campaign list?

I mean, obviously there will be some overlap, but should there be a separate. Basically sign up so that, you know, like if you have an email list where you talk about your latest offer or something like that.

So I don't think most people have this dilemma. Most podcasters, I don't think they have this dilemma. I think they usually are just capturing email addresses for. To inform people about their.

Their podcast.

But if you have a business, if your website is sarah st.john.com and then you have sarahsaintjohn.com podcastnewsletter, maybe when you go to sarah st.john.com people are signing up to learn about your offerings. They're signing up to learn about. Yes, also your podcast. Yes, also this, yes, also that.

It's probably a good idea for you to have a checkbox that's like, if you want to hear about my podcast news, if you want to hear about my latest offerings, if you want to hear about events that I've got going on, and maybe they can click to subscribe to certain emails, maybe not all. And then you can sort of categorize which emails go out to which segment of the subscriber list.

That's what I was thinking, like segmentation. And then as far as newsletters, do you recommend like once a week?

I recommend posting when there is content, but not making up content for the sake of having to post. So if you've got nothing to say, don't say it, but you should have something to say.

You know, you've got, you've got people who, who have subscribed, they want to hear from you. Your challenge is to make sure that you're always giving them actual value.

So, for example, I never have this problem with my podcast recommendation newsletter because each week is curated by a different person and anyone could curate a list. So I have a long line of people who want to curate lists. I have a submission form and I take that.

And then I, throughout the year, I line up different themes to different times throughout the year. And so other people are always curating my newsletter for me.

All I have to do is put it into Beehive, make it look nice, check it over, make sure the links work, maybe write A paragraph or two of my own experience or what's going on in my podcast world. But it's good to go. Right. I understand that other people have a situation where they are.

You've got a podcast and you want to put something out, and that can be tough. But I think you also can build for yourself a situation that helps feed your content machine.

Maybe each issue you feature a quote from one of your listeners who is written into you or who's left you a review. Maybe you find a quote on the Internet that relates to Hurricane Katrina. Really, this is a ridiculous, ridiculous example that I'm giving.

Maybe you find a quote somewhere that talks about natural disasters and then you write about that quote. Right. There's always ways to come up with content.

Yeah. So you had mentioned with Beehive that there's the ability to monetize it.

Yeah. There's a few different monetization options, and you don't necessarily qualify for all of them. Depending on what plan you're on.

On the free plan, I don't believe you can play with these. So I ended up upgrading because I wanted to test them around. But basically, I can turn on boosts, and then what happens is I can.

I can scroll through all of the available boosts. And that means every newsletter that has made themselves available, they say, I will Pay, let's say, $2 per new subscriber.

And then if I put the ad for that newsletter on my newsletter, and people click and subscribe and stay subscribed, I think, for at least two issues of that newsletter, then I get $2 per subscriber.

So if it's a great fit, if I'm advertising in my podcast recommendation newsletter for a gear newsletter that also focuses on podcasts, that's probably going to be a great fit, and I really might be able to make some connections. But if I'm advertising in my podcast recommendation newsletter for, like, ice cream, that's kind of random.

And yes, people who like podcasts probably like ice cream, but it's not where they're going for ice cream news. So that's one of the things you can do.

You can also, on the other side of things, you can have your newsletter be available for that, so you can pay per subscriber acquisition.

So I could say to anybody else on Beehive, I'll pay you A$25 for each subscriber that you send to earbuds with, and I can cap that at, like, let's say $75. So 75 divided by 1.25 would be however many subscribers that is, and I would stop paying after that.

And that could be split up between a number of campaigns, a number of different newsletters. So I like that. Just as a way of testing out, first and foremost, if you have a website, point them to your website so that you get that traffic.

The second place, if you don't have a website, is to point them to if you have a landing page that your hosting provider gives you. So buzzsprout, for example, creates a really nice landing page. Transistor creates a really nice landing page.

And then the third option is Episodes fm, which is similar to what used to be or similar to a service called Pod Link that I used to recommend, but now I recommend Episodes FM because what it does is it allows you to search for your podcasts and then you essentially find a landing page where you can either listen to the podcast right there and it just looks like a website, or you can click any of the different icons that have Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Good Pods, Castbox, Go, Go, on and on and on.

All of the ones that are available, it's there for you so that when you send it to somebody and they maybe listen on Pocket Cast, but then another person listens on Spotify, you can choose. So it's all about just giving more options so that you don't lose your potential new listeners at any one of those stages.

Actually, we. Let's go into Question Answer if anyone has any other questions.

Yes, I see a few more. Stephanie says. Does Ariel like the landing pages of Substack? They are simple paragraphs. They are kind of boring.

Substack doesn't give you super much flexibility when it comes to customizing, but you can do a little bit. You can make sure that your colors all look good.

If you have a podcast that has a pretty strong brand identity, you can make sure that your font looks good, you can make sure that your buttons are the right color, things like that.

And most importantly, because it's just paragraphs, make sure it's not just a big block of text, but you're breaking it up and there's some white space in between. And make sure that you're not writing too much. We don't need so much to convince us to subscribe to a newsletter.

I saw advice somewhere a few years ago that was like your one line description of your newsletter should have the word, should have the phrase this newsletter is for. And then just answer that right? This newsletter is for people who want to learn more about podcast growth.

This newsletter is for people who Want to learn more about natural disasters in the South? I am so dark.

Yeah, I'm curious how that's on, I guess, because there was that.

Helene. Yeah, there's so much. I'm always thinking about climate change, you guys. I have two newsletters, Sarah. I use substack for my podcast, and Mailerlite.

My art says. Stephanie, when you asked before.

Okay. Did either of y'all have any other questions that you hadn't typed in?

Yeah, I had a question. So I have two podcasts, and I've been doing the LinkedIn newsletter with them. I've done it more.

My first podcast is called the Story of My Pet, and so it's all about advocating, educating around animal rescue and adoption. So I've turned it into blogs and all of that. But my new podcast is brand new, so I don't really have an email list for that yet.

And so I was thinking a newsletter might help me build my email list and also drive traffic to the podcast. What would you say to someone with a newer podcast in terms of adding the newsletter feature?

What is the new podcast about?

It's about women sharing their story through podcasting.

I interview women podcasters about their podcast and why they started, but then I also give tips about how to start a podcast, you know, how to grow, things like that. So it's more like you were saying earlier, a podcast about podcasting.

Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I would. I would put a newsletter together for something like that.

And, yeah, I think the reason for that is because there's a precedent for that. You know, there's for better or for worse, a lot of newsletters about podcasting. But that means that people who.

Who want to learn about podcasting know that in order to get more information, they're probably going to subscribe to a bunch of newsletters. So. Right.

I think because that's a behavior that we have recognized as successful for converting these types of audiences, it's worth playing in that sandbox. Okay. Yeah.

And I thought it would help me build the email list also. It's just going to be different to get it started because I don't have an email list to send it to you. It's kind of like using it to start.

It also allows you to say you want to partner with other podcasts about podcasting or other podcasts about storytelling, other podcasts about career, and those podcasts are bigger than you, and you want to do some sort of swap, you can say, I also have this newsletter. I also have impressions in this newsletter. So there's a number of reasons to have it beyond just to build your audience. Right.

Okay.

Thank you. Yeah. And I guess, yeah, like you mentioned, you could do newsletter swaps, kind of like pod swaps.

So that.

And so you talked about monetization on the beehive side.

But I know that you monetize, like, directly, like having people featured in your newsletter or how does one, I guess, decide when it's time to do that and how to go about that?

How to buy an ad in a newsletter or how to monetize their newsletter.

Yeah, monetize.

So I started monetizing pretty early because I was making this newsletter in 2017 on my own, but I didn't monetize through dollars. And that's the fun part. What I did was I really wanted to go to Podcast Movement.

So I emailed the founders of Podcast Movement, and I said, can I please advertise for your conference in my newsletter in exchange for a ticket? That's worth a lot of money, right? But they said yes.

So I encourage people to think of things that you want beyond just dollars, especially worthwhile events that your community might like. Worthwhile other newsletters that your community might like.

Whatever the situation is, find a way to bring them content, bring them connections that are worthwhile for them, that don't look like ads, that don't feel like ads, but that are technically ads. There's not really a number that you should be at before you should start monetizing.

If you find the exact right sponsor, and that sponsor doesn't care that you only have 300 subscribers, because it's really the perfect match, let's say backup generators for your podcast about natural disasters. Yeah, that's going to be a really good match.

And if that's the case, then they might just be interested in doing it because they're really going to hit people who need that information right now. They need that content right now, and they need that product right now. I think a lot of people like to say, how much should I be charging for my ads?

I got advice one time that was like, for every a hundred subscribers, it's $10. But also, again, that will depend very much on how much of a match the sponsor is.

If it's the generator, I would charge them a lot, but if it's about ice cream, I'd probably charge them not a lot at all, because they're probably not going to get that many conversions. It's more of a. More of a brand play for them so that maybe a few people see that they exist and are interested in advertising to this demographic.

And then I recommend having a few tiers and having a few areas within your newsletter that are. That might look more like they're built in. So, for example, I have a new tier within my newsletter.

So like I said, each week is curated by a different person. Anyone can curate a list for free. And when you're a curator, you can include one of your own episodes as part of that theme for free.

But I just opened it up so that you can do an entire list for money. So if you want to recommend five of your own podcast episodes now, you can do that, but you have to pay more for it.

So that's going to look like real content and it's going to sound like real content, but in order to give somebody that much freedom over the newsletter, they're going to need to pay.

And I think another thing too is like, or at least in my. What I've done is when I get a podcast sponsor, I also include them in the newsletter as well.

So I think it helps when they know that they're being seen not just. Or not just heard in the podcast, but also seen in the newsletter and so on and so forth. Yeah, well, awesome. I know you got to go.

So were there any other.

I did see one other question. Stephanie said, OMG, I forgot all about LinkedIn newsletter. Do we have to do that, too? I think you're going to know my answer.

You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. I think what you should do is experiment with it.

What's cool about the LinkedIn newsletter situation is that LinkedIn is always trying to get more people to stay on LinkedIn for longer.

So if you test it out and they like your newsletter, maybe they'll decide that they want to throw you into the algorithm and get you some more clicks that way. There's not really a way of auto publishing from your email service provider to LinkedIn, so you'll have to sort of copy paste.

But it is a way of being More active on LinkedIn, giving your subscribers or the people that just see your posts on LinkedIn an opportunity to comment on the stuff you're working on. So I think there are some reasons to test it out maybe for a few months and then decide if you want to continue.

My experience with, excuse me, LinkedIn has been good. Like when I first started the newsletter for my podcast, people started subscribing really quickly and it definitely boosted activity on my profile.

So from that perspective, like you said, I really just copy and paste my newsletter my blog post and edit it a little bit for LinkedIn and just another place. And when I a lot of times people have it set, they'll actually get the notification for new newsletters in their email, not just on LinkedIn.

So even another touch point.

I have one last question.

Oh, go ahead.

And this actually might there. I just want your opinion on this and this might be good for like Sarah and myself.

So I just looked up Kit and it looks like you can do the like up to 2,000 people for free. I don't know how big my list is. Definitely underneath that. It seems like it'd be better to switch that.

Cause I know Beehive has like a paid Tier already but ConvertKit is like 2000 and they have the recommendation platform so it almost seems like better to move over there because then you sort of get that recommendation community for free right off the bat.

So you can. In Beehive I think you get up to also 2,500 subscribers for free.

Oh, import.

Yes, yes. Oh, okay.

Okay.

So and this is just something good to know. Beehive and Kit are really fighting against each other. Yeah, I've been watching.

I've been watching.

So honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they said oh, Beehive does this, we're undercutting them and then they're going to do the opposite next week. It's fascinating to follow, it really is. But I would just say I think they're going to be going like this with feature parody.

So I don't think one is right over the other.

Well, awesome. Well I appreciate your time Arielle and if people want to check you out, where do you recommend they go?

Easiest is my website, arielnissandblack.com, which I think still exists. I think I forgot the password to the wix so it might go away soon. But for now Ariel.com or just Google my name.

Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you all for joining us today and I appreciate all yalls time.