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- The Latino Newsletter's First 37 Weeks
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NEW YORK— It’s Friday afternoon on the East Coast, and we are publishing an extra newsletter post this week. Consider this another chapter of the nonprofit media journey.
During our winter pledge drive, I want to share some of The Latino Newsletter’s startup accomplishments. When this all launched around 37 weeks ago (at least, that is our weekly streak of publishing daily Monday-Friday posts), I promised that we would be transparent in sharing data along the way.
Earlier this month, we posted our 2024 financials, where we identified a $2,046 budget gap that we are quickly closing through donations. Speaking of donations, the following image shows how much we have raised since securing a fiscal sponsor (Tiny News Collective) last August.
Of those 112 first-time donors, several of them are supporting us with recurring donations.
Because of this, we are averaging around $117 per donor. That’s about $10/month.
As for subscribers, we now have two platforms —Beehiiv and LinkedIn— where we run a version of the newsletter that people can sign up for and opt-in. (The X version of the newsletter is not a subscription setup.) Here is where we are with subscribers:
Beehiiv
We love that The Latino Newsletter has maintained a 66.1% open rate through organic signups, web traffic, and social media. We have not spent advertising money on signups. We don’t do boosts, either. That all might change in the future, but for now, the strategy is slow and steady.
The most important thing right now is to publish one post a day, from Monday to Friday. And engage your community everywhere you can online. That’s it.
We are incredibly happy with the results of that strategy.
And because of this slow and steady approach, we are now beginning to see more interest in sponsorships with higher rates. I am confident that we will be able to have the Beehiiv hosting platform pay for itself in the next couple of months. We almost reached that goal this past month.
We confess that we did not expect to see such initial success with the LinkedIn newsletter. It was a pleasant surprise, and I think our LinkedIn subscriber list will soon surpass our main Beehiiv version. I have always believed that your work needs to be in as many places as possible, and the LinkedIn wins prove that. As of today, the LinkedIn version has 1,054 subscribers. That’s less than 50 subscribers than the Beehiiv version, and we launched the LinkedIn version later.
We are also seeing increased traffic and interest from new fans. We will take it.
Let me know what you think and whether you want me to share more of this type of data. In future posts, we can definitely feature search, web traffic, and social media growth.
Have a great weekend, and thank you to all who support us! We are about $1,500 away from meeting our winter pledge goal. You can give at this link or click on the thumbnail.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder and publisher of The Latino Newsletter.
And now a word from today’s sponsor. (Full disclosure: The Latino Newsletter makes $2 for anyone who clicks on the Authory ad. Based on our historical open rates, if 60% of you click on the link in the ad, that would generate significant revenue for just one newsletter post. Think of it as a way to support us without having to donate. FYI, I also use Authory for my professional portfolio.)
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Do you believe in creating new journalism lanes for Latinos and Latinas? Do you believe that U.S. mainstream outlets will never understand our community? Consider donating to The Latino Newsletter. Any little bit helps to keep this newsletter free and accessible to all. ¡Gracias mil!
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