Is My Newsletter Scalable?

0:00I personally believe and am backed up by a heck of a lot of data that says the most powerful most successful and most valuable businesses in the world are not audience businesses. They're not about your direct relationship with your audience. It is about how do you create valuable relationships between members of your audience. I passionately believe that is where the world is going.

0:32Hi, I'm Gina Bianchini, and this is People Magic, where I am going to show you the absolute easiest way to create a$1 million community. Hi, Gina. I'm someone who listens to your show, but also subscribes to Substack. So I'm curious, how does your nine-part series translate to other platforms? It's a great question. So the way People, Magic, Profit translates to other platforms, whether you want to build a newsletter, whether you're thinking about your social media following, whether you are building a course, it really comes down to this. to stand out at this moment, you want to make sure that you are really clear about your ideal member, what and how they are going to have their best year ever, pulling those two things together into your big purpose, which is again, a very specific formula.

1:34I or we bring together your ideal member so that we can achieve whatever it is you put in your best year ever. So the key thing is, and this is the thing that is true for any kind of business that you want to build at this moment, niche is hard. I have found that it is so much easier to focus in on a person in a transition. And that has been the most profound, most popular, dare I say, viral part of People Magic Profit. Because when you can get at the core of someone's transition and help them go from point A to point B, first of all, they are going to be highly motivated to pay attention to your email newsletter, your community, your courses, your challenges, your events.

2:30Second, they are going to be the ones that also are going to try or apply the things that you want to do. And then as they apply your particular framework, as you inspire them with the stories that you want to tell, the ideas that you want to impart on them, they also are going to go and talk about it. They're going to go share it. So that's the really key thing to get right. Now, the other things around monthly themes, a weekly calendar, daily polls and questions, I think you can also apply monthly themes and a weekly calendar to an email newsletter. Monthly themes obviously help somebody see progress.

3:13You are actually helping them on that journey through that transition with themes that change month after month. And then the weekly calendar is just being consistent with your newsletter, for example, going out every Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. The benefit of consistency in whatever business, but especially businesses that are about creating a connection between people. Certainly an email newsletter is a great way to create connection between you and your reader or your audience. I personally believe and am backed up by a heck of a lot of data that says the most powerful, most successful, and most valuable businesses in the world are not audience businesses.

4:01They're not about your direct relationship with your audience. It is about how do you create valuable relationships between members of your audience. I passionately believe that is where the world is going. So great news. You have started with an audience. You can apply ideal member, focus on a transition, best year ever. What are the results and transformation that person wants to get? How do you pull together the ideal member and their best year ever into your big purpose? All of that applies to pretty much any kind of people business, any kind of digital business where somebody is buying insights, where they are buying a connection to stories, experiences, and ideas that help them move from point A to point B.

4:54And then obviously you're going to apply an offer. Obviously you're going to apply how you launch the thing. And I think that the biggest challenge with a newsletter is that you can't really create a magical first experience because Because fundamentally, to create a magical first experience, you kind of need other people. And you need a beautiful and exciting way of introducing people to each other. In summary, there are lots of pieces of People Magic Profit that you can take and apply to a newsletter, to a website, to a content business, basically. Great place to start. What you really want to do from there though is say, wait a second, how do I make this easier?

5:46How do I make this more interesting and how do I make this more valuable? And that is creating connections between people and letting them run with it. Letting them create the value for you that accrues back to you and your brand and what you're creating and what you're building and ultimately what you can charge for. And I think that that's going to be the biggest difference between an email newsletter and creating People Magic through community that is then monetized with courses, with memberships, with challenges and events. So the entire point of People Magic, what we're doing with this show, what we're doing with our software at Mighty Networks is to make it trivial, trivial to create and grow a community.

6:42And to this point in time, if all you're doing is building a forum or a chat, that is actually probably making it feel like a email newsletter is easier to do. I write something down, I publish it. People read it. I get that, Gina. Like that's an easier business for me to go build. There's a couple challenges with that. And we see this a lot because at my networks, a lot of people are moving from other platforms or their email newsletter alone. And so this is what we've learned and this is what we've seen. So number one is as more and more people create newsletters, people don't have the time to read them.

7:33So it gets harder and harder to stand out from the crowd if you are building a newsletter. Now, that does not mean you shouldn't think about having a newsletter as part of a broader portfolio of pieces that live within your digital business or as I like to call it or think about it is as you create a value journey from the very first touch or how you create an introductory offer all the way through to your core offer to your level up offers or how you create the experts. in your community, in your, yeah, in your community. We're going to just say community, man, because that's really what it is.

8:18So as we think about newsletters versus community and how the two things intersect. So first of all, I think that a newsletter is a fantastic, absolutely fantastic intro offer way of getting started. This is why we have our integration with ConvertKit to make that super, super easy. You're already seeing this, though, with email newsletter platforms where they realize that retention and scale gets really hard when all you have is content. And so you see, oh, well, let's add chat. Let's add comments. Let's add comment threads. Let's add maybe live or live video or all of these different pieces.

9:03And all of those are the tell. that a newsletter alone is not going to scale to a million dollars for more than 0.0001 % of the world. There are other things that then email newsletter platforms are trying to do like, oh, you'll make money by referring more people into our email newsletter platform or brand advertising brand sponsorships. All of those things are fantastic. They're fine. The probability that you are going to easily create a million dollar plus business though, doing those things, it's challenging. It's not impossible, but it's challenging. And what is going to happen more and more because the software is getting more and more sophisticated and is able to do this, is the value that people, subscribers, are going to get not just by consuming your content, but by meeting and building relationships with other people, other subscribers, other members.

10:11That is infinitely more interesting. And the reason is actually kind of logical if you think about it, which is if I am coming back for a number of different people, that gives me a lot more reasons to interact and invest in the brand. And if all I'm doing is coming back or consuming content, and that is the one place that I'm interacting with you as a newsletter writer, then I don't have as many reasons. I was about to use a sports analogy of shots on goal. But then I was like, the minute I open the floodgates on sports analogies, I'm just going to mix them all up and it's going to be a disaster.

11:00So the opportunity to bring people back more often because they're building relationships with each other. This is how the absolute best businesses have been built. And they are the easier business to build. It's just that they require more sophisticated software. and software that's actually harder to build. So there's a lot more people out there talking about, hey, just build a newsletter. It's so much simpler. It's so easy. Or even there's a lot of other people out there that are like, oh, all platforms are alike and you just need a forum and that's a community. And let's focus in on all the other marketing techniques like affiliates and which by the way, sophisticated software has as well.

11:44We support affiliates and ambassadors and all sorts of good stuff on Mighty, but that's not the point. The point is People Magic grounds you in the opportunity to create value for people by introducing them to each other and giving them things to do that will create value for them in their life. And that is the fundamental difference between a newsletter and people magic and creating people magic and monetizing people magic through memberships, courses, challenges, and events. I'm Gina Bianchini. Thanks for tuning in. And this is People Magic. Thank you for being a part of People Magic. If you want more of a deep dive in any of these topics, but certainly having the framework of People Magic Profit, head on over to the website.

12:50The link is in the show notes. Have your own burning question about creating people magic? Well, I want to answer it. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to just drop your question in the review section wherever you're listening to this podcast and keep tuning in.

13:13Thank you.