r/beehiiv

Happy to help where I can! Currently the newsletter is at 18.4k subs and I send 3x/week.

Hey everyone,

I write a weekly personal finance newsletter on Beehiiv, and I'm wondering how you all market the newsletters.

I am posting on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Reddit, but I seem to be getting no traction at all and no subscribers.

So I would appreciate any and all tips. I tried searching Reddit, but I could not really find anything directly related to my thing, hence the new post

Thanks

Honestly, I run a few newsletters. This one gets neglected the most. Not currently doing anything to grow it, so it's slowly declining as unsubscribes happen here and there.

I monetize it with sponsorships, in a package, alongside my other newsletters so, it's making a little bit of money.

• 1,134 subs
• ~30% open rate
• Organic growth through content marketing

I had been emailing about 3 or 4 times a month but, it has dropped to about 1 to 2 times monthly in the past few months.

Audience is filled with digital marketers, content creators, small business owners, and wannabe-entrepreneurs and marketers.

Let me know what you think. Serious offers only.

I've been growing an AI newsletter for the past few weeks, and while I'm enjoying the process, growth has been slower than I expected.

Right now, I'm focusing on organic methods:

• Posting on LinkedIn
• Posting on X
• Sharing valuable content
• Engaging in communities
• SEO

I'm still only around 30 subscribers, which has me wondering:

Is it too early to think about paid ads?

For those who've grown a newsletter:

• Did you ever run ads?
• If yes, what platform worked best?
• At what subscriber count did you start?
• Or would you recommend sticking with organic growth until I reach a certain milestone?

I'm not looking for a shortcut—I just want to understand what has actually worked for people who've built newsletters.

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences.

hi team,

With the holiday weekend coming up--hope all who celebrate get a day off!--I wanted to make sure everyone knew about the 2 new webinars we hosted this past week.

In addition to our normal "Jumpstart" webinars that focus on new users to the platform, we've also implemented Deep Dives and Office Hours recently. This past week, we hosted two Office Hours sessions.

The first was Using our MCP to Optimize Your Business. Was a great overview of how to use beehiiv's new MCP v2 tool to aggregate publication data and set everything up.

The second was an Office Hours on How to Grow on Social with our Social Media Lead Chi. A Forbes 30 under 30, Chi understands how to grow, stay consistent and not burn out.

Links in the thread and hope you enjoy!

Hi everyone, im currently building out my newsletter agency and im looking for newsletters that needs help growing through paid ads. I will be doing this completely commission free inreturn for me to use this as a case study. Any newsletter owners having problem growing let me help you.

DM if you are interested

How are you sourcing brands to advertise on your newsletter?

The Beehiiv ad network gives me the same 4-5 ads each week (Superhuman, Morning Brew, etc) not all are relevant for my niche. My ads CPC isn't profitable as my newsletter is fairly dense.

Thanks in advance!

What is the best way to grow a local newsletter for free?

I recently started a newsletter for my county where I write about the new growth and developments that are happening every week. It’s a pretty fast growing county so I thought it would be a good idea.

If you write a local newsletter, what’s the most effective method you’ve done/seen to grow your audience?

I've been promoting my newsletter through high value advice followed by a cta to my newsletter and also staying active in many subreddits by trying to give advice and commenting a lot. However, many of my posts never gain any recognition or engagement but if I compare that to a lot of low quality posts, many of them gain a lot of engagement.

Anyone have any tips for me or do's and don'ts or any good examples to reference?

I've been watching the beehiiv features launched around podcasting over the last few months with curiosity. For context my readers are small artisan business owners (think candlemakers, artists, puzzle makers, indie yarn dyers, etc.).

We produce a quarterly magazine as well as weekly articles for our readers. This context will be helpful later. 😊

I had started doing some audio recordings of articles (won't use the AI transcription as my user base finds this to be a turnoff. ) As a creator/editor it also lets me inject a little personality into the content. I initially added these as audio recordings within each article, as I didn't quite understand how integrated the podcasting features were yet. But doing it this way was a little clunky as you have to click through each article and then listen to the recording. Plus the reporting isn't great if you do it this way. So I have been exploring podcasting to help with this.

We are also on the Scale plan (4 podcast episodes a month). I'm curious if others have explored the podcasting features or integration with Spotify. On our end I started a podcast in beehiiv, and it has a mix of free and premium episodes. These "episodes" are basically the audio articles. I'm utilizing the podcasting features perhaps in a different way, and making it more efficient to distribute audio articles for listeners (as opposed to what might be more traditional podcasting).

I bumbled my way through the beehiiv/Spotify integration (it was hard and didn't quite work as the instruction say, but I am not convinced that was all beehiiv's fault). While it was clunky, I did finally get it to work and have published both free and premium episodes down to my Spotify feed! When someone clicks on the premium episodes, they come over to your beehiiv paywall as advertised. The podcast on Spotify is of course so new that few have found it yet.

I'm curious- for others utilizing the podcasting- are you using the new Spotify integration? Are you thinking about Spotify as new distribution for your existing content? Are you utilizing a mix of free and premium episodes? I would love to compare notes and hear if others are thinking of trying to distribute their content via audio to provide new distribution options.

Would love to hear from anyone who has had success running meta ads to grow their local newsletter -- creative strategy, targeting, landing page or on app form capture, campaign structure, etc.

Thank you in advance!

thanks for the help

Running a small local newsletter on beehiiv (Max plan), ~238 subs and growing mostly from Facebook-group posts + a gated signup form. Set up a custom sending domain (mail.mydomain.com) ~3-4 weeks ago. Auth is all green and I've checked it against real headers + DMARC reports: DKIM pass, SPF pass (SendGrid return-path), DMARC pass and aligned. DNS on Cloudflare. No spam complaints, no unsubs, opens trending down as the list grows colder (~10-14% unique).

This morning 3 brand-new Gmail signups all got the welcome automation and not one opened it, so I'm worried the welcome (and maybe editions) are hitting spam for fresh Gmail/Outlook inboxes during this cold-start window.

I know beehiiv runs Smart Warming by default (blends my custom domain with their shared domain for ~6-8 weeks). My actual question for anyone who's been here:

- Did you push through warm-up on your custom domain, or start sends on beehiiv's default/shared domain and move to the custom one later once you had size + engagement?

- For those who started shared and migrated later, did switching trigger a second warm-up / did placement actually get better?

- Any read on whether 3/3 non-opens from cold Facebook signups is really spam, or just Gmail Promotions tab + low-intent people not checking?

Not looking for the "shared domain = inboxing magic" answer. I run another newsletter at ~15k that ALSO uses a custom domain and inboxes great, so I know the real variable is domain age + list warmth. Just want the smartest cold-start move on beehiiv specifically. Thanks.

Been growing a newsletter myself and got frustrated that Substack’s leaderboard is dominated by the same huge names every single time. If you’re under 50K subscribers, there’s basically no organic discovery path for you.

So I built savd.site — ranks newsletters by actual reader engagement (saves, clicks, likes) instead of subscriber count. A smaller, sharper newsletter can outrank a bigger passive one.

Free to list, no invite code needed. Would love feedback from anyone here who also writes a newsletter — what would actually make you want to use something like this?

I just deleted 181 subscribers and I want to explain why before anyone thinks I’m crazy.

I Launched the newsletter building in public the start of June. Tried organic then I switched to running paid ads to grow fast. Three issues in we’re sitting at 993 subs which felt great until I actually looked at the numbers.

Open rates were off. Click rates were off. Something wasn’t adding up.

Turned out my ad targeting had a bug and we were pulling in unverified leads between 70th sub and 309th sub.

The targeting was pulling in people who had zero interest in the content. They confirmed, got on the list, never opened a single issue. They just sit there and do nothing except make your count look good and slowly destroy your deliverability with Gmail and Outlook.

I segmented everyone who didn’t open anything some of them were friends and family I personally wanted in. Oh well Didn’t matter. They had to go too.

Force unsubscribed 181 people. Dropped from 993 to 812 in about a hour and half of manual unsubscribing ( no scale plan yet, yetttt Ima get it soon :) )

Fixing the targeting now and honestly the list already feels cleaner. 25% dead weight gone means every real subscriber actually counts. Open rates and clicks should climb. Deliverability improves the longer I run clean.

812 real subscribers slowly grinding back up to 900 waste of budget too. Be careful don’t do what I did.

Back to climbing toward 1,000. Should hit it by end of the week.

Anyone else gone through this? Curious how long it took for your metrics to actually recover after a purge.

ive been running a newsletter and building in this space for about a year and a half. the single biggest lever for organic growth wasnt writing better issues, it was getting each issue in front of people who hadnt subscribed yet. heres the repurposing system i landed on

1. one issue = 8 to 10 posts, not 1
most people write the issue, share one "new post is up" link, and stop. instead i pull every distinct idea, stat, or line out of the issue and treat each as its own standalone post

2. match the format to the platform
the same idea becomes a short text post on X, a carousel-style breakdown on linkedin, a hook plus screenshot, etc. dont just paste the same thing everywhere

3. spread it across the week
the issue goes out once but the repurposed posts drip out over 5 to 7 days. that one issue carries your whole content week

4. always point back to the free subscribe link
every post ends with a reason to join the list, not just the content itself

thats the whole system and it works even if you do it all by hand, although a bit time consuming. curious what's worked for everyone else here, always looking to steal a better process

https://reddit.com/link/1ui3p9h/video/7qz7l3cn82ah1/player