How We Plan to Hit 60K Newsletter Subscribers in a Single Year

The Hobby Letter is all about sharing our tools and tactics with you. With that in mind, here is our content and growth Strategy for The Hobby Letter in 2025.

Newsletter Content Plan

Consistency: Over the course of 2024 we ramped up our posting volume from once a month, to once a week, to twice a week, but there was no consistency in terms of when we sent letters, or what was free and what was paid.

• The Hobby Letter is a product of The Buster Agency. We share everything we see and learn helping brands across industries scale organically on social.

• In order to have things to share, we need to run the agency… which can take time away from running The Hobby Letter.

• As a result, we didn’t always send our letters on the same day every week.

Ideal Schedule: Full email to all subscribers (Free + Paid) every Tuesday, Hobby+ exclusive letter every Thursday.

• We’ve been sending free subs most of our emails; with exclusive sections for Hobby+ members only.

• Instead of sending every email to free subs with partial value, we will send them less emails but with FULL value.

Content Runway: To help us maintain a consistent send date, our goal is to be a minimum of two newsletters ahead at all times.

• This will allow us to promote newsletter in advance both on social media and in The Hobby Letter itself. Teasing the upcoming Hobby+ letter to free subs at the bottom of each email.

• This will also let us pick which of the two emails is exclusive to paying subscribers.

Hobby+ Benefits: Everything we plan to roll out to Hobby+ members over the course of 2025.

• Exclusive Email Every Eeek: Our best content sent only to Hobby+ members every Thursday.

• Ad Free Newsletters: Receive nothing but the content.

• Access to The Hobby Letter Archive: All previous letters on thehobbyletter.com will be made accessible only to members of Hobby+ (including free emails).

• Free Digital Products: Any and all digital products we sell will be made available for free to all Hobby+ members.

• Live Q&As with Buster and the Team: Direct access to our founder and the team behind The Buster Agency.

• Private Community Access: A private community for those who are actually serious about growing on social media.

• Surprise Gifts: It’s nice to send surprise gifts to your biggest supporters every once in a while.

Growth Channels

Buster Podcast Appearances: Podcast appearances not only get Buster and The Hobby Letter in front of new audiences but it also does two important things:

1. Gives us lots of content we can clip for The Hobby Letter socials

2. Gives us topics people are interested in that we can turn into letters

BONUS: For certain shows, we will gift the host X number of Hobby+ subscriptions to giveaway to his most loyal listeners at the end of the interview.

Social Media, The Hobby Letter: We will focus The Hobby Letter social media on Instagram, posting a minimum of five times per day. To achieve this we will be repurposing two pillar pieces of content:

1. The Weekly Free Hobby Letter 

• Individual quote graphics

• Sliders of specific section

• Full letter sliders

• Green screen videos talking about specific sections

• Green screen videos talking about full letters

2. Buster Podcast Guest Appearances

• When doing a podcast appearance, Buster will record himself and capture his answers.

• This can then be turned into Reels, carousels, and quote graphics.

Social Media, Buster: Buster is the face of The Hobby Letter and we want to leverage the audience he has grown over the last decade on social media.

• In addition to co-posting Hobby Letter content on Instagram, Buster will post on platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook Groups.

• These platforms tend to be where people engage more with individuals than brands.

Long-Form Sharing: Posting the full free weekly email on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Facebook Groups.

• The key behind long form sharing is giving people value where they already are, and if they like it enough they’ll come over.

• A hack to get good engagement on places like Reddit and FB Groups is to find popular discussion topics, do a letter inspired by those topics and then share it into the groups/communities as a way to add to the conversation, not promote the newsletter.

Pre-Send Promotion: Promoting letters on social media in advance to their release (~24 hours before).

Note: This strategy is inspired by Harry Dry of Marketing Examples. Here’s a full breakdown of his strategy.

Giveaways: There are two different giveaways we plan to run for different types of subscribers:

Paid: Giveaway free 30 minute 1:1 consultations with Buster.

• Buster normally charges $1000 for a 30 minute consultation.

• A handful of new people who sign up for Hobby+ each month will get entered for a chance to win a free social media consultation with him.

• This also gives Buster the ability to promote “win a call with me” and not “sign up for The Hobby Letter”.

• Each call can also be recorded and turned into content for The Hobby Letter.

• Each person on the call can also be asked if they’d be willing to give a Hobby Letter testimonial/what they learned from Buster that we can use (not required to do the call).

Free: Giveaway Buster’s five favorite marketing books to one lucky winner.

• All you need to do to enter is subscribe to The Hobby Letter.

Guest Posts: Ask creators in a similar niche to The Hobby Letter to write their own guest post and promote it to their audience.

Affiliate Program: A select group of content creators who receive a commission for every paid subscriber that they drive.

• 30 day free trials of Hobby+ would not count. Only once they have actually paid.

Referral Program: Allow anyone to invite their friends and followers to The Hobby Letter, with gifts at different milestones. Such as:

• Free month of Hobby+

• % off annual Hobby+ subscription

• Shoutouts/free ads in newsletter

Bonus: For Black Friday we might test a BOGO offer where you buy one subscription for yourself but get a second one to gift to a friend or co-worker for Christmas.

Newsletter Swaps: Finding Newsletters that are similar in size with a similar demographic and offering free promo in each other’s newsletter.

Welcome Flow: We currently have an automated welcome sequence for new members of The Hobby Letter and Hobby+ but it has some issues:

• The letters are too long

• The sequence is over the course of a month

• We change the free gift on a regular basis

How We’re Going to Change It: We’re big fans of Pat Walls and Starter Story, we analyzed his welcome flow and are going to model it. Here’s how we’re going to do it:

• Email #1 – Tell a story of how Buster changed his life with social media. Promise a free gift the next day.

• Email #2 – Tell of a big problem Buster faced on his journey, promise to share how he solved it tomorrow. Give free gift.

• Email #3 – Tell how Buster solved the problem. Give a limited time discount for Hobby+ annual.

• Email #4 – Explain how solving this problem for others is the mission of The Hobby Letter.

• Email #5 – Last call for the special offer.

• Email #6 – 4 hour warning for expiry of offer.

Note: One email every day for six days.

Lead Magnet: Have one or two consistent lead magnets instead of swapping them out regularly.

Niche Creator Database: A welcome gift for all new subscribers of The Hobby Letter.

• A list of content creators in different niches and the tactics they used that businesses can use for themselves.

• We currently have a similar version of this that needs to be revamped before sending it out.

Social Playbook: A welcome gift for all new subscribers of Hobby+.

• A platform by platform breakdown with the fundamentals you need to know to grow on social media.

BONUS: The Social Media Consulting Quiz

• A quiz where we ask people questions about their current struggle on social media.

• The results would be a recommendation from us on how to improve.

• We would send the answer to their email after they subscribe to The Hobby Letter.

• We would build the quiz so there’s 3-5 recommendations we could give. With each series of questions/answers funnelling to one of those 3-5 recommendations.

Paid Ads:

• Social: Take top performing content and put paid spend behind it

• Quora: Run ads on social media related questions on Quora

• Newsletter Sponsorship: Pay to advertise in other newsletters with similar audiences 

Traditional PR: Get Buster to do appearances in different publications. In addition to exposure, traditional PR would add further credibility to The Hobby Letter. Some current topics Buster could speak on:

• Live Social Selling

• TikTok Ban

• AI Content

Important Note:

• This is our plan as of January 14, 2025. Our newsletter strategy will shape and evolve as things change, we get feedback, our team grows, etc.

• We wanted to share our plan with you, before we put it into practice. This is our plan for the duration of 2025. It is going to take us time to implement all of the above, and we aren’t going to do it all right away.

• At the end of the year, we’re going to share everything we learned from implementing this strategy. Stay tuned!