Joe Casabona:It would be a dream of mine to grow a newsletter from 0 to 9,000-plus in less than six months. But that’s exactly what Chenell Basilio did. By the way, that’s a full 1,000 more than when we recorded this interview. The way she did it, deeply researched super helpful content.
See, Chenell teaches people how successful creators grew their newsletters to 50,000 plus subscribers. And today, she’s going to tell us all about her process. This was so inspirational to me. So inspirational, in fact, that I launched my own deeply researched, long form newsletter that you can find over at podcastworkflows.com. Plus in How I Built It Pro we talk money and goals for her for the next six months.
Look for these top takeaways. Creating unique long-form content that can be a boom to your website or newsletter. Think about quick capture because that’s important—Chenell uses Apple Notes. And think about who you’re going to cover and how to keep it timely. Chenell will only do deep dives on creators who have built an audience since 2018. She knows what worked ten years ago probably doesn’t work today. So definitely look for her to talk about that.
All in all, I loved this interview. Chenell is fantastic. Definitely check out her newsletter, Growth in Reverse. You can find a link in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/319. That’s howibuilt.it/319. You’ll be able to find her newsletter, my newsletter, and a link to the membership if you want to get the behind-the-scenes stuff on what Chenell is going to do in the next six months. But that’s it for now. Let’s get into the intro and then the interview.
[00:02:00]
Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.
[00:02:23]
Joe Casabona:Hey everybody. Now, if you’re a long-time listener of this show, you know that when I go to a conference, a multi-day conference, there is an amount of time where I’m interviewing a bunch of people from that conference. Chenell Basilio is a little unique in that I asked her before the conference, but we met in real life at the conference. So I’m really excited to talk to Chenell today. Chenell, how are you?
Chenell Basilio:I’m doing well, Joe. Thanks for having me.
Joe Casabona:My pleasure. Chenell runs the Growth in Reverse newsletter, which is… it’s like my Sunday reading. Your newsletter comes out on Sunday. I think I told you this at CEX, which is the conference I didn’t name earlier, but I actually print your articles as a PDF to put on my Kindle so I have uninterrupted reading time with your content. I think it’s that good.
Chenell Basilio:Wow, thank you. Yeah, you told me that and I was like, “I’ve never heard this before.”
Joe Casabona:Yeah, it’s probably a ridiculous workflow, right? I could easily read it on my iPad or something but like, I don’t want notifications or distractions. And I can highlight and make notes, which then get synched to Readwise, which is cool. Readwise is it such a great tool.
And I’m sure we’ll talk about tools a lot because you have a very interesting process. I’m also going to direct people to Jay Clouse’s episode, your interview with Jay over on Creator Science because you cover a lot of things that we are not going to cover here because I want unique content, one of the important things we need. If you do a lot of shows, right, you don’t necessarily want to say the same things over and over again, right? You want fresh stuff.
So this is something I’m sure you did cover with Jay, but how did you come up with the idea for Growth in Reverse? You launched this in December 2022, right? Now as we record this, it’s May, you’ve grown to 8,000-plus subscribers. How did you come up with the idea for Growth in Reverse?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. So I have been floundering around on the internet probably since like 2014 after I found Pat Flynn started some websites, ended up helping people with paid ads. So I’ve just seen people be able to send emails, like send one email and make like thousands of dollars overnight. And that was always interesting to me.
But then I started learning about people like Mario Gabriele from The Generalist, and he was able to build like a $300,000 business in a couple of years as a solo guy. And then you just start learning about more stories. And I was like, “I want to figure out how people do this without running paid ads or having a built in audience from a previous role or something.” So I just kind of started doing the research and I figured if I was starting this much time, maybe somebody else wanted to read it as well. So I started a newsletter about newsletters.
Joe Casabona:That’s fantastic. That’s kind of how this show was born. I was asking people how they built their online businesses, and I’m like, “Wait a minute, this feels like a good podcast.” In 2016, it was. I guess it still is, right? It’s still like a main income generator for me. But I like that you were scratching your own itch, right? Which is like early episodes of this, long-time listeners, when I talked about WordPress, again, will know this was the origin story for a lot of WordPress plugins. Oh well, we felt like everything else was bad and we made this and then we decided to sell it.
I think what’s super interesting about you and yours is that it’s I know how to code, right? I can write a plug-in, right, and then set up a landing page or whatever. You don’t just inherently know how these people are making money. It takes you like 20 to 25 hours of research. Like your day job is doing ads for people. Does that take a lot of research? Is research just, deep research something you’ve always done before?
Chenell Basilio:No, not really. I do deep research for like other things. Like I probably spend way too much time before I pick something to buy. If there’s two options, I’m one of those people who obsess over it and I’m like, “Oh, but is this the right move?” So maybe in that sense, but not necessarily in a work sense. But then I realized how much I really enjoy it. So it just kind of worked out.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, that’s really interesting. Do you don’t know you CGP Grey? He’s a big YouTuber. He’s been on YouTube forever. He’s one of the few people who can just publish a video every couple of months and still make that like a big supporting part of his business. But on his podcast Cortex with Myke Hurley, he’ll get into his process for research and he’ll spend like hours at the library digging into these books. He was researching like how the name Tiffany became so popular. It was one of these and like, it sent him down these rabbit holes. It’s just really interesting.
And I feel like again, in today’s world of instant gratification, it’s like I should be able to ask ChatGPT, “Oh, how did the name Tiffany come about?” And then I just get told. You know, “how does Pat Flynn make his money?” I just get told. So that’s super interesting to me. I have grand visions of doing deep research. But one of the things holding me back is like, Is this going to affect my bottom line? Do you worry about that stuff? I realize I didn’t prep you about money, so if you don’t want to answer that question, you don’t have to.
Chenell Basilio:No, that’s okay. Are you asking if all of my research takes away from client work or…?
Joe Casabona:Yeah, I guess that’s really the question, right? Like the opportunity cost of doing 20 to 25 hours of research, that’s half a workweek.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. Well, I guess the good thing about it is I want Growth in Reverse to be my full-time thing eventually. So I’m kind of trying to make that transition. Suspending all this time upfront is just okay with me because it’s how it’s going to happen.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, that’s really smart. That’s the right way. This is, again, the right way to build a business when you have… you talk to a lot of people who do client work and they want to make a product their thing. I’ve heard a lot of it’s just really hard to say no to client work. And I’m like, “Well, you got to make your product a client.” Like, you need to do that and treat it as another client so that you build that time into your schedule.
Chenell Basilio:It helps that this is fun and I’d rather be doing this than client work, so it’s easy to make the time for it.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, for sure. Right. Like pseudo-procrastination, right? Because it’s like, Oh, I want to do this, but also this is the thing. This is where I want my business to be. That’s really interesting.
So let’s talk about your research process because this is another thing that’s really interesting to me. I don’t know if I have the patience or wherewithal. I tweeted the other day—I’m back on Twitter for those who don’t know—I tweeted like, What’s something seemingly unrelated you learned in school that helps you with your profession today? A creator mentioned like, “Oh, I was a journalism major and now I do these sort of things.” I wish I had more journalistic gumption and I just don’t. Where do you start with research?
Chenell Basilio:I guess it’s really figuring out like who I’m going to be researching that week, which takes way more time than it probably should. I wish I could just sit down and put together a schedule because I have to make sure there’s a good angle there and there’s something that people can relate to. I only do deep dives on people who started their newsletter more recently. So 2018, 2017 is probably the earliest and more recent.
I don’t want to start with somebody like James Clear or Tim Ferriss because the ways they grew are not really relatable anymore. So while I would love to do that, it just doesn’t seem like… at least at this point, I’m just going to stick with the more recent ones.
Joe Casabona:I want to pause and really drive that point home. Because I respect everything Pat Flynn has done. Pat Flynn started his podcast in 2009, maybe 2008. The way he grew his podcast… I don’t think he does this right. But if he’s telling you, like, “This is how I grew my podcast in 2009,” that’s just totally irrelevant to people today. I mean, there’s 14 years ago that is like a whole lifetime in internet years.
So I love that you have this pretty hard stop on just slightly pre-pandemic maybe how people grew their newsletter. Because you’re right, like James Clear and Tim Ferriss, if they started a newsletter, say, today, they would immediately have millions of subscribers on it.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. So I want to make sure it’s relatable. So I try to keep it more recent.
Joe Casabona:Awesome. So you don’t have like a sweep file of random names and just like pick one off of it? Or do you, and then you’re like, “Oh, they recently did a podcast interview, so this is going to make my research a little easier or whatever?
Chenell Basilio:I have a list. I’m not that thoughtful about it like you mentioned, like making sure they have more recent stuff. But I’ll start going through the list. Sometimes I’ll be like really excited about someone and I’m like, “Oh man but they were writing on Medium for 11 years before that. Oh well, never mind.” So then I have to scratch them off and start again.
Joe Casabona:That’s super interesting. So you’re really looking for like they started, like, started, started.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. I mean, maybe they were doing something online, but they didn’t have… like Justin Gage from Technically, I did a deep dive on recently, and he had been writing online for years, but he didn’t have an audience, so I felt like it was okay. He pretty much started building his audience more recently.
Joe Casabona:I think you said something similar about the ByteByteGo guys. Like one of them was posting pretty regularly on LinkedIn but like wasn’t actively building an audience. That’s really cool. I like that angle a lot. Because it’s like I joined Twitter on April 1st, 2007, April Fool’s Day, which is always a little joke in my head, like, “Oh, of course it was.” I was in college still.
Actually, I’ve deleted every tweet from before like 2020, I think. I wasn’t actively building anything. I was still getting web design clients from word of mouth. I’ve completely moved industries now. So that’s super interesting. So let’s say once you pick somebody, what’s your first step?
Chenell Basilio:So the first step I will create like a Spotify playlist of all of the podcast interviews they’ve been on, I guess you would say. And also if they have their own podcast, I’ll kind of go through and pull out some good episodes that might seem to have some insights. So some of the people I do deep dives on, the list is very long, like 43 hours of content long, but some of them are just like a couple here and there, which is pretty surprising and sometimes makes it harder. So I’ll create that playlist and then I kind of just start running through it.
Joe Casabona:Do you listen at like two or three x?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah.
Joe Casabona:You do, okay. I mean, with the people who’ve been on dozens of podcasts, say, I assume they do start to get repetitive after a while. Is there a point where you’re like, “All right, I’ve heard this story like four times. I think I could stop listening”??
Chenell Basilio:I usually don’t stop listening. I’ll just like, skip through it. I do all of my listening when I’m walking. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I usually do like four or five-hour walk. So I’m listening to all these podcasts. It’s a good way to like, I don’t know, stack habits, if you will. So it makes me go and walk, but I also enjoy it.
Joe Casabona:That’s really interesting. I listen to podcasts when I walk too, but they’re all like irrelevant or whatever. I started listening while I’m running and I realized that I’m not taking notes while I’m running. I have like two thoughts, which is like, This is how much time I have left, and then don’t die before that. Like don’t die before you get to your doorstep.
So, you know, I go back and forth. Like, Should I listen to music? Should I listen to podcast? I can probably pick entertaining ones during the run or whatever, and then research or thought-provoking ones during a walk. In any case, have you seen Podchaser? Really interesting tool. I think it’s Podchaser that does this. You can like look up a person and basically get a list of all of the podcasts they’ve been on.
Chenell Basilio:Hmm. Nope. I haven’t. Thank you.
Joe Casabona:No problem. That’s a really good tool.
Chenell Basilio:I was using Listen Notes for a while.
Joe Casabona:Okay. Okay. Maybe it’s just because I’m not so embedded in the podcast editing space, or maybe it’s because I haven’t been in it since like 2010. But there are people who absolutely hate Listen Notes. They’re like, “This is the worst tool. All of their rankings are inflated because they include every podcast.” And I’m like, “Okay, fine. It’s still a good tool, though.” I will link both Podchaser and Listen Notes in the show notes which you can find over at howibuilt.it/319. I mean, as well as everything I’m going to talk about here because we’re going get into tools in a minute. And people love tools.
Okay. So you listen to so many podcasts. Do you look at like written interviews or YouTube videos or I assume some stuff that they share, though? You have some numbers that I’m surprised you were able to find. Some you extrapolate but some I’m shocked that that’s public knowledge.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. So the podcast will help a lot with that. So usually a host will say, “Oh, this person has grown their email list to 50,000 subscribers or whatever and they also have 75,000 Instagram followers.” So as I’m walking I have an Apple Notes document open and I’m just like taking notes of like, Okay, this was published in November 2021. It’s probably around that timeframe that they recorded it. So then I’ll put those on until like a Google sheet and go from there.
Joe Casabona:Nice. Is your Google Sheet just like listing numbers. Are there like formulas?
Chenell Basilio:Well, actually, I guess there are some formulas. Like if I only have a couple of numbers for certain things like subscriber count or whatnot, sometimes I’ll kind of like guesstimate like how many paid subscribers versus free based on previous ratios, if you will. But most of the time it’s just plain numbers.
Joe Casabona:Nice. And then you create these really nice-looking graphics too. Do you use Canva for that?
Chenell Basilio:I do use Canva, yes.
Joe Casabona:That’s awesome. All right, so you listen to a bunch podcast, you find blog posts, whatever else they’ve published online. I suspect you also subscribe to their newsletter.
Chenell Basilio:Yes.
Joe Casabona:Okay. So are you subscribed to like a million newsletters?
Chenell Basilio:Yes.
Joe Casabona:And do they all hit your email inbox or do you use something like Feedbin or I know Reader or Readwise to like pass those out?
Chenell Basilio:So I set up a different email address and I just subscribe with all of those. But yeah, it’s a lot to go through. And usually I just have them being sent to it. And I don’t always read them all. So once I do a deep dive on that person, I’ll just go back and search for them.
Joe Casabona:That makes sense. If you really want to get wild with this… This is I think my best-performing blog post over time, I wrote it in like 2010 and it still gets a bunch of hits, is like the “*” operator in Gmail. It also works in Microsoft Outlook, I think. Are you aware of the “+” operator? It’s like your username plus and then any other word?
Chenell Basilio:Oh, yeah.
Joe Casabona:Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, that feels like a lot of work because then you’re subscribing with a bunch of discrete email addresses technically, but it’s really easy to filter at that point if it’s like Chenell+ whoever, Tim Ferriss@gmail.com.
Chenell Basilio:I usually set up labels in Gmail based on the person.
Joe Casabona:Nice. I use the “+” operator mostly to see if people are selling my email address. That’s how I like to do it.
Chenell Basilio:You know what I realized lately, though, is like if someone signs up through Upscribe or like one of those referral programs, if they subscribe to my newsletter and wrote +plusgrowthinreverse, and then they signed up to yours through Upscribe or whatnot, and you sold their address, it looks like I did it.
Joe Casabona:Oh, yeah, right. That’s a good point. Because they’re just sending the same email address. That’s really interesting. I use Upscribe and something that frustrated me a little bit is that they’re not subscribing… they just kind of get tagged, but they don’t tell you that on the setup. So if I want people to go through my welcome sequence… Like the first time I saw it, I had to add that tag to the automation, which again, I told you in the show before we started recording.
My ConvertKit automations are like a Rube Goldberg machine of nonsense and exceptions and things like that, which I want to ask you about in a minute but I do want to keep going through this research process. So you have all of this data. So what do you do with that? Do you try to find threads or narrative? Do you already have the narrative kind of going into your research? What’s that like?
Chenell Basilio:So I’ll usually maybe have some semblance of like what I think is going to come out of it. But usually they’ll say things multiple times throughout different interviews or they’ll mention it in a blog post and then talk about it on a podcast. So then I’ll kind of like dig deeper into their and be like, Did this really help them grow quickly? And then if it did, I’ll add it to my list. But I try and keep it between three and five like growth levers, if you will. I mean, I’m sure I could add like 50 for each person, but I try and do the more impactful or ones that will resonate with people.
Joe Casabona:[inaudible 00:18:15] is the one I’ve most recently read or the one that really resonated with me the most. But like you even said explicitly in that one like you’re not going to grow as quickly as they did. But it’s like easy to look at creators who grew really quickly and be like, “Well, that’s definitely not going to happen for me and like turn off, right? I really like Jay Baer’s content, but I kind of felt that about his talk. He was like, “Yeah, I just turned my hobby into a business in like six months.” And I’m like, “No one does that. Almost no one does that.”
Chenell Basilio:Right. But he also has a ton of marketing experience. So like he knows… Yeah.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, I like the way you do that. Like you highlight. But do you get pushback on that where it’s like, well, you know, of course, they were able to do it? Or does like your constraint of, well, they have to have started relatively recently kind of guard against that or inoculate against that a little bit?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah, I haven’t really heard that too much. But I think it’s also because I add that little disclaimer, like, you’re probably not going to grow this fast.
Joe Casabona:You talk about the growth levers or levers. Giveaways was one that stood out, sharing the right way on social media. When it comes to growing your own newsletter, how do you stop yourself from implementing everything that you learned? This is something that I struggle with. Like I interview somebody and I’m like, “I want to just go off and do what I just learned. I need to practice restraint because then I would just work on my business the whole time.”
Chenell Basilio:I think that it comes down to how much time these take me, so I really don’t have the bandwidth to do all of that, although I would love to because like with every deep dive, I’m like, “Wow, that’s so cool. I want to replicate that for my own thing.” But it’s just like I barely have enough time to put out like Twitter content. So yeah.
Joe Casabona:Right. Awesome. Is this like a Monday to Saturday thing? Like you do the research the first few days and then you spend some time writing the story, is that kind of how it works?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. So those first three days or so, depending on how many podcasts there are, it’ll usually be me just hustling to try and get through all of the content. And sometimes I’ll skip a few if they’re not super relevant. But yeah.
So I’ll do all that and then I’ll come back to my desk and kind of like look through what I’ve got, go through like YouTube because sometimes there’s like YouTube videos that aren’t turned into podcasts and then there’s also blog posts and even just going through their old Twitter account, tweetMax is the tool I use. It’s kind of like Twitter Advanced Search, but a little easier to use.
So I use that in kind of go back in time and be like, Okay, what did they post in 2021? Like how did they grow their Twitter account then? But that usually comes from seeing if there were any dips or spikes in their growth. And I’ll be like, “Okay, well that was a big month. What happened in that month?” And I’ll try and dig deeper.
Joe Casabona:Nice. That’s awesome. I’m not going to try to find it right now because I feel like that makes horrible interview content. But there’s a tool around YouTube where you can set up alerts for searches like that too. So you can put in like a name, like common use cases, like, I’ll put my name in, and then I’ll get notified when a video use my name or whatever. So that might be a pretty interesting tool as well.
We’ve been talking about tools a lot, so let’s dive into it. You mentioned Apple Notes as your note-taking app. You mentioned Google Sheets. I’m going to do a quick aside on Apple Notes because I saw a tweet the other day—I’ll try to link this in the show notes as well—where it was like the technology adoption curve and it was like the Luddite is the person who never wants to adopt. The Luddite is using Apple Notes and then the very technical or early adopter person is using Apple Notes. And then in the middle of the curve is like this guy who’s like sweating, trying to connect obsidian to Readwise to Pocket or whatever. And I’m like, “Gosh, this is a direct attack on my character.” I’ve since moved to Bear Notes, which is like Apple Notes with markdown support.
Chenell Basilio:Okay. I was using Obsidian for a while though.
Joe Casabona:What triggered the change in you? Because I’ll tell you, for me, I use Craft. Craft is like a centerpiece of my note-taking. It’s like this is using a plane to walk down the street. So that’s why I kind of moved to Bear Notes. I’m like, “This is a note taking app, not like a brain system or whatever.”
Chenell Basilio:So the reason I moved back to Apple Notes was because when I’m on a walk and I’m trying to open the Obsidian app, it has like all these things like, refreshing database, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in that moment, I just want to take a note. So with Apple Notes it’s just quick. That’s the only reason. It’s nothing fancy. It’s just fast.
Joe Casabona:Yeah. Which is the perfect use case, right? I ran into that issue again with Craft. I’m one of those people who talk out loud to my devices even if I’m in public. So I’ll say, like, “I have an idea,” and that triggers a Siri shortcut that for a while was opening a Craft note. But Craft, I guess you need to have the screen active for it to work. And I’m like, “Well, this is useless if I’m dictating notes.” So I moved to Bear, which doesn’t have that constraint. But I have to. If that happens, I’m going to move to Apple Notes because, like you said, it’s about speed—like you want to capture it quickly.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. And they have the dictation as well. So that’s super helpful because I’m moving. So it’s like hard to look down and try and type something so I can just speak into my phone.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, that’s exactly right. I usually have a cigar in hand when I’m walking too, so I’m like one-handed typing, whatever. My walks are not for health purposes, obviously.
Chenell Basilio:Well, I hope you don’t have a cigar while you’re running.
Joe Casabona:No, definitely not that. After the run. Celebratory cigar. Like, what’s the point? And I’m like, the point is that I did it. The point is I proved to myself I could run a half marathon. Run is generous. “Participated in and completed” is usually how I word that.
Chenell Basilio:Better than nothing.
Joe Casabona:Yeah, that’s true. If you’ve gone to Disneyworld or Disneyland and they do the runs there, they have… they’re called the balloon ladies. They keep a 16-minute pace. And if you fall behind the balloon, ladies, you get swept up by this truck because the race needs to be over at a certain time so they can open the parks. So I’ve never been swept up by the balloon ladies. And that is really all I care about.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah, I mean, that’s a win in my book.
Joe Casabona:Yes. So Apple Notes for notes. Are you tagging them, keeping them in a folder? Are you deleting? Because I imagine if you’re doing 20 to 25 hours of research and there’s like hours and hours of podcast content, you’re probably taking a lot of notes. You’re just leaving them there or do you like clean up every week? What’s that like?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah, they’re in a folder called Deep Dives. I keep swapping back and forth between like creating a folder for each specific deep dive and then a note for each podcast or just like having it all in one note. But yeah, so I’m still figuring that out.
Joe Casabona:And then like, do you clean up every week or are they just like there now?
Chenell Basilio:No, they’re just in that Deep Dive folder. I think.. Oh, actually I have an archive, so I’m moving them into the archive.
Joe Casabona:Solid. That’s how I do it in Craft and I move everything to my archive. It’s just like a disaster. But like, you know, if you want to reference something later, you can easily search it. So you have your Apple notes, you’re keeping things in the Google sheet. Where does the actual writing happen?
Chenell Basilio:In WordPress? And you’re probably gonna yell at me for that, but it’s just easiest.
Joe Casabona:And are you using the Block Editor?
Chenell Basilio:Yes. At this point I have migrated to the Block Editor.
Joe Casabona:I will generally write in Ulysses, again, mostly for the MacDown. Okay, this is again like an old-school guy thing. Like if you’re writing in WordPress in like 2006… I started using WordPress in 2004 and it started in 2003. So I have been through it all. But if you’re writing in the browser in 2006, I’d be like, “Yeah, you shouldn’t do that because if anything happens you are losing your content.” But today they’ve got auto-saving, they’ve got revision history. It might as well be a native app, right? It’s as reliable as anything else.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. And the easiest part for me with WordPress is that I add a ton of graphics and images. So I can just be writing and then hit enter slash image and input that specific graph or…
Joe Casabona:What theme are you using? I think I looked this up because I was curious.
Chenell Basilio:GeneratePress.
Joe Casabona:So using GeneratePress. Are you using any special block, plugins, or anything like that, or just kind of what comes with WordPress?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. I mean Generate Blocks is probably the plug-in, but I don’t have anything too crazy in there. It’s just mostly what comes with it.
Joe Casabona:Because there’s like a lot of stuff. I the Cadence theme and Cadence Blocks, which essentially makes like a page builder. They have their rows and things like that. There’s like spectra, which has a cool timeline, block, or whatever. But I find like, especially if you’re not using Chrome, if you’re using like Safari it just becomes untenable to use anything that’s JavaScript-heavy. So I think as lightweight as you can keep it the better. Cool. Okay, so you use WordPress for your website. You mentioned Upscribe. So I assume you’re using ConvertKit for your newsletter.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah.
Joe Casabona:And then I’m subscribed to your newsletter so I already know the answer to this. But you’re not connecting WordPress to ConvertKit in such a way where it sends the full content via ConvertKit, right?
Chenell Basilio:I think they would get cut off by Gmail because usually my articles are like 3,000 to 5,000 words long and have all those images in them. So I think it would just…Yeah.
Joe Casabona:Okay, cool. Was that the main reason that you decided to do it that way? Like you wanted to design your content in a less constrained way than ConvertKit offers.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. I don’t know that I thought about it that hard. I think in the past I’ve just been someone who publishes stuff on WordPress. So like I always just started that way and then I was like, Oh, I’ll just link to it from the newsletter because it seemed like a lot to copy-paste and reformat and all that.
Joe Casabona:That’s awesome. And then do you see a pretty high click-through rate?
Chenell Basilio:I do, yeah. The total click-through rate is like 11% or 12%, but then some people are clicking on other things.
Joe Casabona:Nice. I mean you have a lot more subscribers than I do. Something that I notice is that I have some subscribers who click every link and that’s just like their email client automatically clicking links and it frustrates me mostly because there are some links that only they click on and I’m like, “Well, this is not any validation. It’s really a bummer.”
Chenell Basilio:Yeah, I actually read an article about… I forget who wrote it, but they put a hidden link in. So like only a bot would click it. So like you can kind of see who.
Joe Casabona:Oh yeah. The old honeypot thing that you do with forums, right? Make the hidden feel that only a spam bot would fill out and then you know it’s spam. That’s really interesting. I was listening to Deliverability Defined which is ConvertKit’s podcast today as we record this. It was like an FAQ episode and they kind of mentioned the automatic clicking. And they’re like, it doesn’t really affect deliverability and like some clients do it to like make sure that it’s not dangerous links or whatever. And I’m like, Okay, I guess that’s fine. I’ll like live with this. But it’s still like, Oh wow, somebody clicked on my product. It’s like, Nope, it was that guy who just automatically sent everything.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. Or you can send an email and then look like 30 seconds later and you’ll see like 20 clicks on the same link. And I’m like, No.
Joe Casabona:Bummer.
Chenell Basilio:But yeah, if you have a lot of subscribers who are working in like corporate jobs or that kind of thing, they usually have like a firewall spam filter.
Joe Casabona:That is exactly what they say, Alyssa and Melissa on Deliverability Defined. That’s what they said. That makes sense. So Apple Notes, WordPress, ConvertKit. Anything else I’m missing here for the tools that you use in your research?
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. Readwise. We kind of talked about that.
Joe Casabona:We did, but I would love to talk about that more because I love Readwise. Do you use their RSS reader as well?
Chenell Basilio:I do not.
Joe Casabona:Do you use any RSS reader?
Chenell Basilio:I do not.
Joe Casabona:Okay, interesting. So Readwise, for those who don’t know, you highlight stuff and then it goes on to Readwise. And you can tag it and Readwise will resurface things that you’ve highlighted. The purpose it served, at least in the beginning, is like you make a bunch of highlights on Kindle and then you never look at them again. And with Readwise they will resurface those Kindle highlights daily for you. I suspect you and I use it very similarly, in that we read a website, we see something interesting, highlight it, tag it, reference it later.
Chenell Basilio:Are you using the reader?
Joe Casabona:Yeah, that’s the RSS reader thing. But it’s not just RSS. Reader by Readwise is like a RSS thing, but it’s also a read-it-later thing. So I was in their early private beta. I think it’s great. Like they convert PDFs to text so you can like highlight PDFs. They give you an email address for you to subscribe to newsletters.
I actually just switched my email address for your newsletter to my actual email address, since I usually end up saving your article in Readwise anyway, right, because it’s not like the full content. So I’m just like, “Well, I’ll at least see how her newsletter is designed. I have no idea what a newsletter actually looks like. That’s like one of the things that Feedbin does better than Readwise Reader is like they will make an HTML copy of the newsletter so that you can see it properly formatted. Readwise has fully focused on like parsing text and making it look good. So I don’t actually know what most newsletters I’m subscribed to look like.
Chenell Basilio:Interesting. I’m gonna have to subscribe to myself on some of these.
Joe Casabona:People asked me how I always stay inbox zero. And I’m like, one of the things is like newsletters never hit my inbox, most newsletters. Most of them are going to… I used Feedbin for a while, I used Inoreader for a while, but they all give you this discreet email address that you can subscribe to newsletters with. It falls down a little bit because I’m subscribed to like the dispatch and certain member full sites with Readwise. So I also get receipts sent to my RSS reader, which I don’t love, but no way around it. Cool.
So how do you use Readwise? I think we probably just talked a lot about how you use it. But like your tagging system and stuff like that.
Chenell Basilio:So I’ll just kind of dump everything I find through Google or YouTube or anything like that into Readwise, and then tag it with the person’s name. That’s pretty much the extent of it. It’s not that robust of a system. But sometimes I put a bunch of stuff into Readwise, and I don’t actually look at it again. But yeah.
Joe Casabona:Do you use the Chrome plugin? Like they have a really good Chrome plugin?
Chenell Basilio:Yes. And you can use like a keyboard shortcut to save it.
Joe Casabona:Yeah. And then you can highlight in line. I know how it works, but it still feels like magic. It’s really cool.
Chenell Basilio:Yes, it’s very magic.
Joe Casabona:Another thing I really like about Readwise Reader is you can subscribe to your YouTube subscriptions, and pull those in and then it also pulls in the transcript. So you can actually highlight the transcript of YouTube videos. It’s a pretty neat feature.
Chenell Basilio:It is neat. The only problem I found with that is that I use a Chrome plugin that speeds up videos, and I had to change all my keyboard shortcuts. When I was trying to like speed it up, it would close the window because it was the same keyboard and it was really frustrating.
Joe Casabona:Oh, man, that is super frustrating. Do you know the name of that plugin? Because I would like that.
Chenell Basilio:Oh, yeah. I’ve been using it for probably seven years or so. Video Speed Controller. I’ll send the link to you.
Joe Casabona:Awesome. And I will, again, link it. We’re talking about a bunch of tools, which is very rich show notes page over at howibuilt.it/319. Video Speed Controller. Awesome. I’m gonna check that out because sometimes I’m like, “Just get to the point.” Like most YouTube videos like it’s coming. But seriously.
You have mentioned keyboard shortcuts multiple times. We can end the workflow stuff here because we’re coming up on an hour and we’ve been talking about this a lot. But this is really interesting to me. I think people like it. I have an ulterior motive for digging into workflows a lot obviously that you know about now. How crucial are keyboard shortcuts to your everyday workflow? Because I know some people are like, it’s too many to memorize. I have a few that I use but I rely mostly on my Stream Deck because it’s like graphical representation. That makes a little more sense to me.
Chenell Basilio:I think I’m getting more and more into them because it just speeds up everything. But I’ve been starting to use Keyboard Maestro, I guess it’s like a text expander.
Joe Casabona:Yes, love Keyboard Maestro.
Chenell Basilio:So they actually work with a Stream Deck too. So I started setting up like main websites that I’ll go to like, even just a specific folder in Google Drive. So I’ll do like “:dr” to open that up. Like drive. And so just set some of those things up. I mean, I use quite a few of them but I doubt I’m barely scratching the surface of what I could do.
Joe Casabona:Oh, yeah. David Sparks, MacSparky online, he has the Automators Podcast. The stuff that he and his co-host Rosemary Orchard do with keyboard shortcuts is wild. David has I think three stream decks now. On Etsy, they make this thing that can like stack to 32 button stream decks on top of one another. And I’m like, I feel like I’m like six months away from that. I have like pages on mine and then I have the Stream Deck plus with the dials, but like, it’s very nice. I’ve got a lot going on on my Stream Deck.
Chenell Basilio:At one point I had my iPad set up with like the Stream Deck app, I guess. And you can do like a bunch-
Joe Casabona:Is that a monthly subscription?
Chenell Basilio:I think it was. Yes.
Joe Casabona:I mean, you said you’re referring to it in the past tense. But was it worth it? Was it good?
Chenell Basilio:I thought it was pretty good. I should probably get that back out.
Joe Casabona:Well, I got a number pad thing for Christmas, the MX Master something… MX Cool, not MX Master. That’s Logitech. It’s a number pad, right? And I thought, “Oh, this is great. It’s just 24 keys. I can assign things to numbers. But it’s not compatible with the Mac. And like I’ve tried to make it work with Keyboard Maestro and BetterTouch tools. And just because of that keyboard maps to like the left third of an actual keyboard, it’s never going to work. It’s just really, without their software, super annoying.
I will share one keyboard Maestro thing that I do a lot, which is churn through a lot of options quickly. Do you use Palladio? That’s like Brennan Dunn’s newsletter designer thing?
Chenell Basilio:No. I need to get in there though.
Joe Casabona:It’s nice. For a while, like anytime you added a template it added the color scheme. So I had like hundreds of colors in my brand. And I just wanted to delete all of them. And I figured out where to position my mouse to click and then delete. Like, click, confirm, delete. So I set up a Keyboard Maestro shortcut to position the mouse, click, confirm. I think I did 100 times in a row to like churn through that. So I would just do it and walk away. And then by the time it was gone, all the colors are deleted.
I did that with like Twitter interesting topics, too, because one of the things I did when I came back to Twitter was, like, I wanted to start as fresh as possible. So I think I had like maybe 150 topics that Twitter thought I was interested in. So I just use the keyboard Maestro scripts to like uncheck all of those.
Chenell Basilio:I would probably just sit there and keep clicking.
Joe Casabona:Right. Anytime I click more than like five times in a row, I’m like, “All right, I can Keyboard Maestro this faster.” Okay, we’re coming up on the end here. Something I don’t think I asked you yet. Actually, this is my show notes document is now very powerful.
Tools for social sharing. One of the things that you mentioned to Jay that I think Jay commended you for that, I think is also really smart, is the day before, right, it’s like a couple days before and the day before you’ll tweet that a new edition is coming out. And then what is it? A couple of days after that you cover what you learned and make that a Twitter thread. Is that the workflow?
Chenell Basilio:Exactly. So the teaser, as I call it, the one that comes before the issue goes out is very effective. And I would definitely recommend it.
Joe Casabona:Nice. Again, I feel like this is where I’ve made a tactical error because I created like evergreen—Brennan Dunn will call it like a shadow newsletter—that just goes out every Thursday. But like it can’t just be like, Hey, sign up tomorrow. It’s like tomorrow for these people is always the first tip.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah. But for this new project, you can.
Joe Casabona:Yes. Your newsletter has been highly inspirational to me in starting this new project, podcastworkflows.com.
Chenell Basilio:Heard it here first.
Joe Casabona:Yes, you did. Well, I guess you heard it here first, if you’re listening live. This is gonna come out in a couple of weeks. But yes, this is the first time on the show I’m mentioning it. I’m really excited because it’s like deep dives into people’s workflows. And again, I didn’t feel like my current newsletter was like femoral thoughts really just like what I’m thinking about and repurpose social media posts. And that’s good. Like, that’s fine. I don’t feel like that’s the right path for me to grow my newsletter. And this really aligned with where I’m moving my business. So I’m really excited about it and definitely feeling the teaser. And then again, after the fact you do like the high-level overview of what you’ve learned, basically.
Chenell Basilio:So I’ll just break down like the four growth levers that they used.
Joe Casabona:And then because this is a WordPress site, as we record this, if you know the URL, you can access the articles, right? Do you link directly to the article or do you get people to sign up for the newsletter?
Chenell Basilio:So at the moment, I get people to sign up for the newsletter. And then every week in the welcome email, I’ll update the first link in that welcome email to say, “Here’s the most recent.”
Joe Casabona:That’s the thing I was going to ask you about is how do you… I really wish ConvertKit had this feature. Some do. Is it MailChimp does maybe? It’ll be like, Here’s the latest issue. I love ConvertKit. But like maybe they could have spent less time on templates and more time on that. That’s shade. That’s unnecessary shade, especially because they paid me to promote those templates. I just really wish that was like send them the latest newsletter when they sign up. That would be a very valuable thing. So you manually update that. That’s part of your workflow every week. And then you publish on Sundays. Is there a reason you picked Sunday?
Chenell Basilio:There is not a reason I picked Sunday. The first one I ever did, I finished it like on a Friday and I was like, Oh, I should send it. But I should wait till Monday.” And I was like, “No, I’m just gonna send it. Get this out here.” I think I sent it to four subscribers.
Joe Casabona:Nice. And now you’re at like 8,000 plus. That’s amazing. I mean, we talked a little bit about your growth levers. You do dig deeper into that on Jays’ podcast, so I’ll just mention that. But I will give you the high level overview of the notes I took from that episode. It’s unique content that takes you time. You said it takes you time, but it saves your audience time. Usually, there’s some community around it. Now this is for the people who have built the newsletters. Do you have a community associated to your newsletter?
Chenell Basilio:Not yet. Nope. So just me surrounding myself with other people like Jay’s Lab or other communities.
Joe Casabona:And then start niche or start niche. I guess, start niche. Niche feels like the noun and niche feels like the adverb.
Chenell Basilio:Feels like French or something. Niche.
Joe Casabona:I know, right? I always say niche, and then I get yelled at, “Oh, you’re American?” Yes. Very clearly American. So start niche and go bigger. I really liked that. I think a lot of people want to start big, because it’s like the biggest audience, but you want your stuff to resonate with you, with their listeners.
The last thing I’ll mention here, right, start niche and go bigger, is you focus primarily on newsletter growth, right? Like you’re not talking about how they grew a podcast or how they grew an online store or whatever.
Chenell Basilio:I’m starting to branch out a little bit. But as long as they have a newsletter that has more than 50,000 subscribers, it qualifies. Because I think building an audience in the creator space anymore is like important in general. So if you can build a huge Twitter following cool, but like, if you don’t have a newsletter, why are you doing it?
Joe Casabona:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my friend just got locked out of LinkedIn yesterday. He’s like back today. But really makes you think, like, what happens if you get the forever banned hammer on the social network that you were using to connect to your audience?
This is my real last question. When you promote on Twitter or LinkedIn, do you include the link in the main post? Do you add the link later? Are you using a tool for that? Because this is the other thing, if you link to something externally, it feels like you get dinged.
Chenell Basilio:Yeah, you definitely get dinged. Twitter and LinkedIn are a little different. So with Twitter, Justin Welsh posted in a recent newsletter that he switched up his Twitter teaser post to be like something of value in the first tweet, and then you’re kind of like teasing the next one. So it’s almost like a mini thread. And then the second tweet has actual link. I feel like that does pretty well because it gets people engaging, and clicking through and they’re kind of staying on the platform in a way.
On LinkedIn, I will include the link. I’m testing it out with the comments too, instead of in the actual post. But I haven’t figured that out yet.
Joe Casabona:They killed pinned comments like a week after they rolled them out. I felt that was the best way to do it on LinkedIn because then you can just pin your own comment. Maybe they saw that and were like, “We don’t want that.” So I haven’t teased How I Built It Pro, the members-only show yet, but she’s grown a lot in a few months. I’m going to ask what the next six to twelve months look like for Growth in Reverse.
So if you want to learn the future plans, and how Chenell plans on monetizing the newsletter, sign up for How I Built It Pro over at howibuilt.it/pro. It costs $10 a month or $100 a year. That’s like two coffees. I raised the price. People who listen know I raised the price, and I would say, “Oh, 5 bucks is like less than a coffee at Starbucks.” It’s less than two coffees, which is still really good value. So head on over to howibuilt.it/pro to get ad-free extended episodes of this show, as well as a Friday newsletter on automation. So there you go.
Chenell, if people want to learn more about you and sign up for this amazing newsletter, where can they find you?
Chenell Basilio:So the newsletter is at growthinreverse.com. And then I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn just under my name Chenell.
Joe Casabona:@Chenellco is the Twitter handle. Okay. I will link all of that and everything we talked about in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/319. That’s 319. Thanks so much for listening. Chenell, thanks so much for spending some time with us today.
Chenell Basilio:Thanks for having me on. This was fun, Joe.
Joe Casabona:My pleasure. It was great. It was very illuminating for me. I was really excited to do this. And until next time, get out there and build something.