3 Reasons Your Maker Businesses Won’t Grow As Well Without A Newsletter

Taken the leap and are trying to turn your Maker side hustle into a business, but it’s not growing how you want?

Don’t worry, every entrepreneur has run into this and Maker businesses are no different. You’ve been posting every now and then on Instagram and have a new YouTube video every few months (maybe). The things you make are awesome, but customers aren’t lining up like you thought.

The hard truth is: it could be your content isn’t as good as you think (that’s where I was this time last year).

If it’s not your content, it might be because you aren’t using the most powerful marketing force: a newsletter (and here’s why you won’t grow as fast without one).

Reason 1: You’ll Be Stuck Paying Tribute To The Almighty Algorithms

With a newsletter, you own your audience, not Metta, Google, or ByteDance.

Now, I don’t believe in blaming the algorithm for sub-par content not seeing billions of views (again, I’ve been there and it’s not productive). With a newsletter, the good news is you don’t contend with an algorithm anymore, but the bad news is you can’t blame it anymore either. When you hit send on an email, it will go to every subscriber (as long as they don’t flag you as spam).

Newsletters give you a direct line to your audience and those who opt-in become your core audience and biggest advocates.

Reason 2: You Will Never Clarify Your Thinking

With today’s pace of Reels, Shorts, Tweets, and Stories, it’s easy to throw something out there before you think about it.

When you’re writing a newsletter, you’re forced to clarify exactly what you think. You can’t just vomit words on the screen and expect people to read it. But that’s also the beauty of it: you can think WITH your audience about things and open up a dialog with them.

You don’t have to have all the answers, but you do have to clarify what you’re thinking and it helps make the message better (even selfishly for yourself).

Reason 3: You’ll Post Questions To Stories With Surface Answer Replies (If Any)

Sometimes you want to see what your audience is thinking, so you should ask them in your stories, right?

While you can, the few answers you do get back will be surface level at best. With a newsletter, your readers will give you all the answers and help you improve your paid offerings. Remember, they are your core audience and want you to win, so listen to them.

Social media has more volume, but newsletter dominates with quality.

You’re probably saying, “But David, I hate opening up newsletters in my email! Why should I write one of my own?”

First off, great question, glad you asked. Personally, I can’t stand a majority of newsletters either because they are always asking me to buy something or watch something.

Tomorrow, we’ll dive into a different way to write newsletters that people will actually want to open.

In the meantime, if you have specific questions, comment or shoot me a DM and I’m more than happy to help out!