What have I learned from the first 24 editions of my link-curation-newsletter.

A year ago I launched “weekly crowdfunding pearls” (the newsletter’s service I use to send “weekly crowdfunding pearls” is also a pet project of mine). I read a lot about crowdfunding on a daily basis (also founded a crowdfunding platform a few years ago which still operates), and in this newsletter I curate my best weekly crowdfunding read. I mostly don’t write the content. In the past year or so, I sent around 24 editions, and although I don’t think it’s enough data, I do see some patterns which I’m happy to share with you.

1. Numbers in the headline tend to get more clicks (e.g. 5 Massive Impacts of Crowdfunding; 7 Jobs Available in the Crowdfunding Industry). In most cases I prefer not to share list articles due to their low-quality (I’m not the only one who noticed this kind of articles get more clicks of course), but I did find some great articles.
2. Exclusive links get more clicks. My subscribers clicked significantly more when I wrote “for my subscribers eyes only (for now)” next to the link’s headline. I was able to do that when I wrote the content, but obviously if you have access to other exclusive content (and once you’ll have enough subscribers people will offer exclusivity for a few days), you can do that as well. Of course I shared it via other platforms after a few days.
3. Big time gaps between one newsletter to another will kill your open rate. I had a significant drop in the open rate when I didn’t send a weekly newsletter for almost two months, even though the number of my subscribers increased at the time.
4. But you can recover your open rate if you start sending frequently again. I did saw a significant increase in open rates after 3 additional editions with one week between each other.
5. You should not send newsletters on Fridays. The open rate is bad, I did tried to do it in different hours, doesn’t work.
6. Starting to monetize my newsletter was surprisingly easy. I just started to get ads from RefreshBox and that’s it. Now, it is not a lot of money, because I have around 125 subscribers, but when you calculate the CPM’s (how much money you make per 1000 people opening your email), it looks promising.