The First 3 Months of Scaling a Beehiiv Travel Newsletter

I’ll be honest. I’m not great with social media. You probably already knew this. So I decided to approach scaling this travel newsletter and its respective blog (the subdomain article you’re currently reading) the only way I knew - bloggin’.  

Here are several takeaways from the first three months of publishing my first post on this secondary Pale Ale Travel blog. 

Hopefully, these serve as a little bit of encouragement for you to (a) either start and launch a publication and/or newsletter of your own, or (b) take a more strategic approach than I (by learning from my mistakes). 

Pale Ale Travel Note: The Pale Ale Travel Newsletter uses Beehiiv’s free ‘Launch’ plan, so I don’t have access to many of the in-app growth tools, ads, and more. 

1. Social Media is King

Scaling a newsletter the old-fashioned way - brainstorming and writing blog posts to increase organic search engine traffic - just doesn’t yield anywhere close to the results social media does. 

If you excel at social media. Channel that. If you don’t, my gut says that should be a priority (if you’re solely focused on growth for your newsletter). In the realm of social media virality and growth, there’s not much I can recommend. As it would be a bit like that lady from My 600-lb Life putting you on an effective, regimented nutrition and exercise plan. 

We all know I’m talking about the lady who had her partner help her funnel several gallons of chocolate milk each morning with a beer bong. 

I don’t doubt that scaling a newsletter via organic traffic works with a blog with 1 million monthly visitors. But for small to medium-sized creators with several thousand to even tens of thousands of pageviews/sessions per month, the “trickle-in” of newsletter subscribers just isn’t going to cut it.  

I can only comment on the travel space, but the two most successful ways I’ve seen travel newsletters exponentially grow are through (1) leveraging a network of social media accounts, specifically theme pages that are both directly and tangentially related to their niche and by (2) building up a trustworthy reputation in various social media travel groups/subreddits and then subtly plugging their newsletters. 

The latter is really the only one I’ve had any mild success with myself. The key is to avoid being overly promotional. 

Subreddits can be especially brutal when they sniff out self-promotional grifting.

Pale Ale Travel Tip: If you’d like more insight into why I created a Beehiiv newsletter in the first place, make sure to check out my post breaking down 3 reasons why I’m going heavy on Beehiiv. 

2. Focus on One Thing at a Time

While I’m definitely not upset at building the newsletter to 300 Google Search Console clicks per month (as of the date of publication), I can’t help but feel it would have been better to publish the content to my primary blog.

Frankly, I’m not sure why I decided to build out the blog portion of the Beehiiv subdomain you’re currently reading this on. Scratch that. I know why. I was coming off several Google updates which, thank goodness didn’t destroy my site like others, but had me extremely skeptical about the future of relying on organic search traffic.  

I thought Beehiiv would be a much more direct way to target and capture readers entering their email addresses. At the end of the day, a blog is a blog and nothing is safe when it comes to the volatility of Google’s for-profit, monopolistic, and predatory algorithm.

Pale Ale Travel Note: This is anecdotal but while I believe that Beehiiv subdomains do benefit from the authority of the overarching Beehiiv domain (ex. Quicker indexing, getting out of the ‘Google Sandbox’, etc…), I do think it’s still marginal and not any sort of real failsafe when the next catastrophic algorithm update happens. 

If you’re a small creator, focus on one thing at a time, especially if you already have something viable and already validated. I say this because I have a travel blog (palealetravel.com) that sees annual traffic numbers hover around 100,000 (previously more before several Google updates). 

I aggressively diversified when I could have strategically diversified. What I should have done was simply focus on publishing the same posts on my primary travel site while utilizing Beehiiv’s subscription forms to capture email addresses (leads), along with their sleek interface/design to send my weekly newsletter, and subdomain blog to host the published newsletter (in a gated form). 

Simply put, I could have pursued ‘decoupling’ from Google by continuing to drive organic traffic to my original site while at the same time using the newsletter growth-friendly functions of the Beehiiv platform.

Who knows though - maybe a future Google algorithm update will wipe out my primary site and I will be happy I spent time publishing the 50 posts or so that I did (at the time of publication) to get the ball rolling. 

Pale Ale Travel Note: My primary site was subsequently (and surprisingly) approved for Mediavine’s Journey ad network/program roughly 2 months after launching my Beehiiv subdomain and newsletter. Hindsight is 20/20. Expect an article coming soon on the first month’s earnings.

3. Create More Topical Cluster Assets

Fortunately, I already had several travel and food assets in the bank. I’m talking about detailed travel itineraries, practical eating guides, and simple moving and/or travel checklists. I still could have created more assets to offer readers in exchange for their emails. 

A fault of my asset strategy has been using the ones I’ve created a little too liberally, meaning that instead of offering a Poland travel itinerary as an incentive on blog posts tackling other European destinations, I should have sat down to create a country-specific asset for said article(s). 

That’s not to say that there isn’t some overlap. There is. My point is that I could have definitely been more targeted with my subscription form incentives and offers. 

To avoid spreading myself/yourself too thin, I’d focus on creating assets for topical clusters, or groups of posts that constitute the core theme/focus of your newsletter. Then, create an asset that’s related to it. 

Don’t create an asset just to create an asset. 

For example, if you only have a single newsletter edition or blog post on a topic, it might not be in your best interest to create a supporting asset to capture emails - as I don’t doubt that there is a higher chance of them unsubscribing in the future after they realize it was a “one-off” piece of content they initially received. 

So Blog Life That It Hurts

Overall, it’s been relatively slow growth for the Pale Ale Travel newsletter. 

My biggest takeaway so far is to back off from writing posts for the subdomain blog and continue publishing on my primary site while utilizing Beehiiv’s capture forms, newsletter interface, and gating tools. 

For me, I think becoming more engaging on social media and crafting an effective social media strategy is going to be a long burn, where I (hopefully) incrementally get a better handle on it. 

I’ll continue to focus on what I enjoy the most and what I feel is my highest quality output - bloggin’. It’s been a while since I’ve just enjoyed writing for the sake of writing and for myself, that’s most important.  

If you have any questions about growing a website via quality content, please don’t hesitate to reach out and I’d be happy to answer anything that is in my wheelhouse.

SERP well everyone,

Big Body