Growing an email newsletter to 16k+ subscribers whilst validating your startup idea

Hey 👋

So this month I seem to have the writing bug. I put out a couple of new pieces of content this month and made a point to promote it more. I’m terrible at spending days writing a piece of content and not spending the time to drive traffic towards it.

A few handy tips I found. Firstly, Medium allows you to manually add canonical URLs in their post settings. This is important as duplicate content can hurt your SEO. Now i’m writing content on my personal site I want to ensure search engines know the content on my site is the original content and not Mediums. So I get all the SEO benefit but get exposure via Mediums traffic.

Secondly, be sure to consider submitting your post to a publication. I published my latest piece below and got contacted by ‘The Startup’ (Medium’s Top Publication) and now my post get even more exposure - including all their 680k followers, socials and newsletter

Lastly, I identified a list of platforms to promote my content. This includes Hacker News, IndieHackers, Subreddits, Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter. This great piece of content by Harry Dry inspired me.

Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup below 👇

Last week I was writing a piece of content about the new iOS Widgets feature coming later this year and decided I would have a shot at creating a mockup of a Product Hunt Widget. A few days later Ryan Hoover (founder of PH) retweeted it 🤯

Let me know what you thought of this newsletter by hitting reply. 

Sam | @thisdickie 👨‍💻