A Better Lemonade Stand #288

 💡 Insights

📈 Chenell’s 1400% Increase in Newsletter Opt-in Conversions

Chenell from Growth in Reverse tested a ‘lead magnet’ newsletter growth experiment firsthand and shared the results.

• Lead Magnet: Chenell compiled insights from her deep dives into a lead magnet called the "Growth Levers Library." This is a Notion database that gives subscribers all her mentioned growth strategies.

• Boosted Conversion Rates: By replacing the old opt-in form with the new lead magnet, Chenell's conversion rates significantly increased, from 0.1% to 1.5%.

• Thoughts: I like Chenell’s database-style lead magnet, as it was created in response to her audience preferences. This will also help her convert more subscribers when mentioned in other newsletters. She plans to share many more experiments from her deep-dive strategies, so I look forward to seeing what new growth experiments she will share with us next.

🔗 Analyze Her Lead Magnet Experiment

✍️ 31 Proven Tips to Become a Writing Titan

David shares his insights to help elevate your writing skills and craft content that could create your own reader fan clubs. Including:

• Seamless Writing: Making your writing frictionless and engaging.

• Injecting Personality: In a world full of AI content, how can you bring personality to your writing to make it stand out and engage readers?

• Thoughts: Put these tips into practice for at least an hour daily, connect with everyone, and share stories that will naturally advance your career. The easiest way to get started is to read writing from authors like David and practice frequently by tweeting your thoughts. Check out his boot camp to learn how to write like David.

🔗 Get David's 31 Writing Tips Now

🌱 28 Ways to Grow Your Newsletter for Free

Matt McGarry shares 28 actionable strategies for attracting subscribers and boosting engagement without depending on a large social media following.

• Lead Magnets: Offer targeted resources such as cheat sheets, checklists, and templates to provide immediate value and solve specific problems to attract more sign-ups.

• Social Content and CTAs: How to promote your newsletter using Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Use pre and post-CTAs to create anticipation and drive subscribers.

• Thoughts: Matt has appeared over 5 times in my newsletter since I believe every business owner should launch their newsletter as a foundation for future projects. This guide gives you a general idea of expanding from the ground up.

🔗 Grow Your Newsletter Organically

👤 How to Launch Your First Mini-Course as a Solopreneur

Justin Welsh outlines an eight-step strategy for launching your first mini-course. Mini-courses are an ideal starting point for new solopreneurs and are a less intimidating and burdensome alternative to full-sized courses, providing a manageable pathway to larger projects based on the success of your initial offering. This approach simplifies the process of entering the course creation world, allowing you to build momentum and confidence as you grow your digital product offerings.

• Think Small, Grow Big: Before launching your main course, test the waters with a mini-course to get useful insights and avoid the rush to high-fee monetization.

• Craft Your Course: How to choose a specific topic and price your course appropriately to create a successful mini-course.

• Thoughts: Launching a mini-course is a great strategy to test the market for interest in your bigger idea without committing too many resources upfront and developing pricey resources too early.

🔗 Learn How to Create a Mini-Course

🧰 Apps & Tools

🎯 Nas Challenges: Nas has introduced challenges as a new feature on its platform. This feature enables you to create and launch challenges for your community within minutes. This is a promising opportunity to enhance engagement when it's down and encourage a sense of achievement among community members, ultimately helping you generate more buzz in your community.

👌 Bettermode: Better Mode allows you to nurture online communities with customizable templates, moderation tools, and private messaging features. It can be utilized as an all-in-one virtual hub to help manage your community.

🎭 Lewis: Use this tool to instantly create pitch decks, YouTube shorts, reels, and creative narratives. I played around with it for a bit, and it has some interesting capabilities, from choosing different image styles to creating ‘creator personas’ with certain traits for different storytelling styles. This seems to be a strong trend with AI apps that help you tell stories with AI image generation.

🎨 RenderForm: This allows you to design templates to automate repetitive image or PDF creation without writing a single line of code. You can also connect this tool with Airtable to create images using your data.

📙 AI Directories: If you’ve recently taken my advice on building AI side projects from last week's post, once your project is done, you can use this service to launch your AI product to 100+ directories to help get more backlinks without spending hours doing it yourself.

👨‍💻 WP Dev AI: Save money on devs by using AI to build custom features for your WordPress website instead of hiring an expensive WordPress developer. This tool gives you clear instructions on implementing the code yourself.

🐦 Tweet Easy: This is an all-in-one Twitter tool to generate ideas, craft perfect replies, and improve your tweets in seconds. However, remember to add your personalization to stand out from the other AI-generated content.

🗞️ News

⚡ Zapier Introduces Upgraded Plans

Zapier updates plans, including the transition of Starter plans to Professional at no extra cost and the introduction of Zapier Enterprise. Discover how these changes can benefit your automation workflows and scale your business operations.

• Starter Plans Upgrade: Zapier is elevating Starter plans to Professional status, granting users access to advanced features like conditional Zaps, custom polling intervals, and automatic Zap replays without additional charges.

• Zapier Enterprise Launch: As your project grows, the Enterprise plan can help you scale automation across teams or departments.

• Thoughts: Boosting starter plans to Professional without extra charges is a huge win for us. It gives you access to features that can significantly enhance your automation workflow.

🔗 Explore the Latest Zapier Upgrade

🧑‍🎨 Enhance Your Creativity With DALL-E

OpenAI releases the latest update that allows users to personalize AI-generated images within ChatGPT. Turn your creativity into reality with editing tools and inspiring style prompts.

• Effortless customization: Utilize the intuitive "select" tool to pinpoint areas for modification and describe your desired changes.

• Igniting inspiration: Explore a diverse range of style prompts, from "fairy tale" to "motion blur," to infuse your images with unique flair and artistic expression.

• Thoughts: This feature allows users to bridge the gap between imagination and realization, giving you a symbiotic relationship between human creativity and AI capabilities.

🔗 Unleash Your Creativity With DALL-E on ChatGPT

💰 Investing in Canada's AI Future: Budget 2024 Announcement

Discover how Canada takes its spot as one of the leaders in the global AI race with significant investments from $2.4 billion to bolster Canada's AI advantage, create high-paying jobs, and ensure responsible AI development.

• Thriving AI Ecosystem: Canada's AI ecosystem thrives, driving job growth and innovation across various sectors.

• Key Budget Initiatives: The budget includes funding for AI research, start-ups, safety measures, and enforcement of AI regulations.

• Thoughts: Canada's overall plan for AI, which considers ethical and economic factors, may establish a new benchmark for global AI governance.

🔗 Learn More About Canada's AI initiatives

🖇️ Interesting Links

💪 Top AI Tools

FlexOS shares insights into the top 150 AI tools in 2024 based on a survey it conducted. Use this as an overview of the most used AI tools, with emerging trends and popular platforms in the market. (Link)

🤯 Crazy Business Ideas

I recently came across Ridiculous Design, which curates unusual ideas to solve problems for users. Every creation is informed by research on design trends and user behavior, with a dash of humor. From Instagram users' Fomo Meters to tracking the miles you scrolled through social media. These unconventional ideas can help you think creatively and inspire you to try out one of them as a side project. (Link)

📝 Create Scannable Content

Jeff Felten discusses creating email content that is easier to scan. I find many in-depth case studies to be very valuable, so I don't believe in the approach to ‘tighten’ content for the sake of it, but rather better ‘formatting’ to make it easily scannable. I try to do that with headings, bold text, and bullet points. (Link)

🔍 Positioning Your SaaS

Simon Høiberg shares 8 ways to position your SaaS product in a competitive market. This includes low-cost alternative offerings, which may risk being perceived as a cheap knockoff, and a light version, a simplified user interface that may struggle to evolve while maintaining simplicity. (Link)

👩‍💻 Building a No-Code Newsletter

In this episode of Creator Heist, you will explore the world of no-code with Katt Risen and how she has gone from leaving her 9-5 job to creating a 20,000-subscriber newsletter and becoming a huge figure in the Twitter no-code community. (Link)