✅ Newsletter Affiliates

Hey there 👋,

In this week’s newsletter I discuss my results of running paid recommendations on three different platforms, on different sides of the equation:

• Paying for beehiiv’s new Boosts feature

• Running partner network offers on Sparkloop as a publisher

• Running affiliate deals on Swapstack as an advertiser

I’ve also promoted other people’s offers on Swapstack as a publisher, but most have not been newsletters so am not including here. By the way, they are soon to be launching a new Newsletter Affiliates section…

🚀 Beehiiv Boosts

Over the last week I’ve had 31 new subscribers from beehiiv’s new Boosts paid recommendation feature.

I’ve accepted 5 great publications that are relevant to my invest.beehiiv.com newsletter:

Investing Journal is currently leading the pack so it would be rude not to recommend them here:

All of these subs are still at the ‘pending spend’ stage, so I’m not sure if beehiiv is waiting to clarify engagement or whether this is the standard time horizon.

📈 The Newsletter Platform Built for Growth

I’ve tried almost every newsletter platform, from Drip to ConvertKit to Substack (running 6 newsletters there at one point) to now beehiiv.

beehiiv was founded by some of the earliest employees of the Morning Brew, so they know what it takes to grow a newsletter from zero to millions.

You get built-in referral functionality, true customization, analytics where you can see the results of paid acquisition and now built-in paid recommendations - a new traffic channel to grow your subscriber base, and a new way to monetize your newsletter.

Try beehiiv absolutely free with no credit card required

⚡ Swapstack Affiliate

I’m running this deal on Swapstack where I pay over $4 for any subscriber who is still subscribed after 14 days and clicked at least one link.

Subscribers have up to 60 days to click a link for the affiliate to be credited (as after that I remove them):

So far I’ve received 111 subscribers from Swapstack, of which a whopping 34% have clicked:

However, you’ll notice that 58 out of those 111 have also unsubscribed.

This is why I’ve only paid out for 26 qualified subscribers so far:

I’ve had publishers reach out to me asking why the click conversion rate is so low. I’ve had to explain that I remove anyone who hasn’t clicked an email within 60 days so there is no point in me paying for someone who does not engage with my content.

You can see that I’ve had almost 1200 clicks, so the confirmed conversion rate is 2.2%. Interestingly this is very similar to my experience of Sparkloop Upscribe, as a publisher (below).

🗞️ Classifieds

🆙 Sparkloop Upscribe

Sparkloop’s Upscribe is like beehiiv’s Boosts where subscribers are shown a number of recommended newsletters directly after they subscribe. This was mine:

As such we’re dealing with impressions here, rather than clicks, but interestingly when you crunch the numbers, the confirmed % at 3.25% is very similar to my click conversion rate on Swapstack:

I guess the moral to this whole story is that it takes a lot of impressions or clicks in order to generate a real, engaged subscriber.

👍 Recommended Newsletters on beehiiv

Ok that’s it from me, I’ll be back in your inbox next Friday or sooner if you subscribe to my other newsletters on beehiiv above.

Cheers!

Richard Patey (@richardpatey)

Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is business advice and I am not a professional business adviser. I send weekly updates on the creator economy and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only. This newsletter is monetized through sponsorship, affiliate revenue and my own products.