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Comment by dangelov | Hacker News Reader

I feel like perhaps one of the "problems" is that there are too many different things people might be interested in. So if 5% are interested in cars, the other 95% would find the ad or promo fairly uninteresting and irrelevant.

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You are not targeting properly, you're not solving something customers want, or your product is bad. Those are the three things you'd need to look at. With a couple million subs, it's unlikely you've got a bad product, but it's highly likely you're targeting incorrectly or your product isn't solving a problem. As someone who reads a ton of books, this is a saturated market, what problem are you solving that isn't solved yet or that you're solving better?

All of our books are free and most of them are by indie authors that don't publish on Amazon or other platforms. That works great both for our members who want to keep finding new reads and authors looking for an interested readership base to share their work with.

Based on yours and other comments here, it seems it's highly likely we should work on better targeting. Any suggestions on improving in that regard?

Thanks, appreciate the feedback!

Targeting is all about knowing the true habits of your audience versus what your audience claims are their true habits. As others have said, breaking out your newsletter to the highest value people is probably a good start. You can leave the general email general and require an opt-in for people instead of an opt out. You'll immediately know who is engaged enough to want more of what you're offering, then just ask them what they find the most valuable in a survey and find a way to monetize that isn't what you're already doing but is in addition, in other words, create extra value for them.

Maybe your newsletter could have teasers on different topics that link to blog posts, or articles that will let you create different funnels for different interests. Then, once you have them in the funnel, you are able to gather metrics on what is important/valuable to your readers.

Bonus points if the blog posts/articles have affiliate links for readers purchases.

Gold star if the blog posts/articles are also "sponsored content". Then you're getting paid for that too.

How would you go about that? Include a handful of links to blog posts on different topics and track what gets clicked most? In our experience including many links in an email can quickly land you in spam, so I'm curious how you'd go about this and get to a reasonable representation of people's interests. Would you rotate topics on say a weekly basis and track over time?

Sponsorted content and linking to it from the newsletter - that's an interesting idea. Thanks!

I think, basically using the email to point to blog posts and other content you create/manage (or sponsored posts). I agree nor just a link, but you'd need some kind of teaser, a few sentences or a paragraph lead in with a "continue reading" link to the full article/post, etc. Each link would track clicks and such so you could build up data on what is popular, and who likes it.

The key being, once you have eyeballs out if the email and on a page, you're more open for affiliate links and advertising options based on the data you're gathering.

True. We'll look into ways to experiment with that. Thanks!

The percentage is not that important, the question is which segments are profitable. Try to identify 5 segments that add up to 20% of your readership, try to sell ads/strike partnerships with businesses interested in those segments. After 6 months, look at which of these are not profitable vs. effort/resources spent, and discontinue them. Keep looking for new segments.

That sounds like a direction worth looking into. Thank you!

Do you know of any resources (like a reverse Upstart.me) that might make it easier to find potential partners for the segments?

I don't, unfortunately. But start with segments you or a partner know best, obviously.

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