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How To Grow Your Newsletter With Memes

How To Grow Your Newsletter With Memes

PLUS: How to sell newsletter ads, Sparkloop Upscribe, affiliate marketing, and more

Matt McGarry
March 25, 2023

Welcome to The Newsletter Operator!

In today’s email:

How to use memes to grow your newsletter (paid and organic growth tactics)
Advice on newsletter ad sales – from The Hustle’s top salesperson
Two newsletter’s seeing crazy growth from Sparkloop
And much more…

Deep Dive

Believe it or not using memes can be one of the best ways to grow your newsletter.

There are 2 ways newsletters, creators, and media companies are using memes to grow:

1. Memes to drive social growth and engagement

2. Memes as ad creative to drive paid growth

Let’s start with number one…

These folks are amazing at using memes to drive social and newsletter growth:

Overheard on Wall Street on Instagram
The Marketing Millennials on LinkedIn
RocaNews on Instagram
Litquidity on Instagram
Trung Phan on Twitter

Their strategy is simple:

1. Find great memes

These accounts aren’t making memes from scratch. They’re finding the best memes already created and posting them.

What they’re amazing at is curation.

(To be fair, these accounts do make original memes too – and they often give credit to the original meme creators.)

They’re also great at tweaking a meme to better fit their audience (especially Trung Phan).

How do you find great memes to post?

Twitter (make lists of meme accounts)
Reddit (find subreddits in your niche)
TikTok (use hashtags to search)
Know Your Meme
ImgFlip

The key to finding great memes is to curate great accounts and sources, check them daily, and keep finding more sources.

2. Plug your newsletter below popular posts

On Twitter, you can use Tweet Hunter to add an auto plug to a tweet when it hits a certain number of likes.

On LinkedIn, you can plug your newsletter in the post text or in the comments.

On Instagram, you can add a CTA for your newsletter by directing people to your “link in bio”.

Plus, you can add more CTAs with links in your stories. More on Instagram growth here.

Platform Opportunities

You’ve probably seen the rise of “meme pages” on Instagram and Twitter, but there’s one platform where the opportunity to grow a meme page and drive newsletter growth is huge.

That’s LinkedIn.

Daniel Murray, creator of The Marketing Millennials has done an amazing job at this. His LinkedIn company page has over 600,000 followers!

And his LinkedIn growth is driving subscribers too:

The Marketing Millennials is a WorkWeek newsletter. Adam Ryan the founder of WorkWeek reported in February that LinkedIn was their largest organic growth channel, generating over 12k subscribers that month.

I suspect The Marketing Millennials was the largest driver of their LinkedIn subscriber growth.

Daniel also talked about his LinkedIn growth strategy on the Creative Elements podcast. I recommend checking out the episode here.

Paid Growth

Using memes to drive growth with paid ads is much more simple.

Here’s how:

Find memes you can use to show the benefits of your newsletter
Use them as creative for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter ads

The key here is not to make memes that are funny. When using memes as ads, your memes should focus on showing a benefit of your newsletter (or product).

Memes grab attention. People are conditioned to read them. Use that attention to show a reason why people should subscribe to your newsletter.

Here’s where to find memes for your ads: