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How 2-Person Agencies Handle 200+ Clients (With Their Sanity Intact)

Let's address the elephant in your Slack channels:

That polite “looks good” email? It carries the silent scream of:
“Who hired these clowns?”

Fact: Your clients aren't stupid.
You know they smell fake expertise from three screens away.

As a smart agency owner yourself, you refuse to pretend to be an industry expert for everything. Instead, you extract clients' actual genius.

But until now the processes for “genius-extraction” relied on a complex, time-consuming setup. And expensive employees.

With Pressmaster one white-labeled conversation link transforms their brain dump into weeks of authentic thought leadership that makes them say:

“Holy sh*t, this sounds more like me than I do.”

And with another click distribution sparking high engagement on all platforms is solved as well.

Without pulling all-nighters. Or burning out your team. Bold promise. We know.

Discover more

Hey,

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for quite some time, you know that I’ve made a lot of changes with this newsletter.

And as you know change is the only constant. But the current version of the newsletter is the most popular. I am getting good responses.

But, the current version is inspired by Chennel and Harry (marketing example), as I’ve said in my 66th edition.

Chennel highlights the growth levers of the top creators and breaks it down, but in my case, I niched it down and only talk about the email marketing part.

Now, let’s say hi to the woman who inspired me to start this newsletter.

Chenell Basilio

Creator Spotlight:

Chenell Basilio is the creator of the "Growth In Reverse" newsletter, which focuses on analyzing and reverse engineering the growth strategies of successful newsletter creators. She launched this newsletter back in December 2022 (her first edition was on 4th Dec with 4 subscribers including her own) and in the last 2 years, she has built an audience of 40K and monetized her list too.

Chenell is an Arizona State University graduate with a B.S. in Geography and a GIS Certificate. She also studied Web Design and Online Communications at the University of Florida.

Before starting her newsletter, Chenell worked in digital marketing for small businesses and held positions at AAA Club Alliance, where she managed search marketing campaigns. Her marketing experience helped her greatly in growing the newsletter. She helped her clients with paid ads and noticed that people could make millions of dollars with just an email list which led her to start her deep dives. Basically, in her search for solutions, she created a business.

How did he grow her email list?

Chennel grew her email list to 40K in just 2 years. Here are the 3 ways she used.

A. Distribution

Your newsletter growth depends upon how you distribute your content. And Chennel mastered it. She keeps writing about his newsletter on Twitter and LinkedIn regularly in order to attract the audience.

She engages a lot on Twitter, as I always say the real game happens by engaging with others, not posting motivational content.

Also, as you see me asking you to refer to “Dark Chocolate” and get a reward, she did the same with sparkloop upscribe and it helped her to reach to new audience

Because the deal is if you refer to 10 people you’ll get a shout-out in her newsletter.

B. Content quality

Chennel’s newsletter comes under long-form content as it consists of 4000 words+ and Chennel invests 20+ or sometimes 50+ hours to research about the creator.

She knows the audience reading her newsletter and the way she structures her newsletter.

That leads to audience retention and new audiences joining her.

Visual element:

Chennel uses visual elements in her newsletter to make complex stuff easy to grasp and to retain the audience for a longer period of time.

She uses these visual elements on social media, and due to their quality and visual appeal, people get more interested in checking her work.

Overall, she is helping new newsletter creators skip the “hard” part of entry barriers in the newsletter world and then scale it.

First 100 subscribers

When she started back in December 2022, there were only 4 emails from them one was her own.

However, according to her, her first 100 subscribers came from Twitter just by updating her bio.

C. Teaser

Have you ever seen the posts I make on Saturdays? If not, listen. Most of my subscribers come from the teaser posts I make on Saturdays asking them to join.

The rest of the time I soft promote comments or signposts about it.

Similarly, Chennel teases the upcoming deep dive every Saturday. Those posts usually bring her 80-150 new subscribers every week.

Now let’s come to the part which makes you come back to my email again and again.

How Chennel makes money using email

As I mentioned earlier, in each of his emails, he offers something specific at a given time.

Chennel makes money from 3 main sources:

1. Sponsorship

She sponsors brands and attaches visual or text-form ads to promote their website or any certain service/product

Like this:

2. Consulting

She coaches new newsletter creators to grow and scale their newsletters and she offers a 1:1, 1-hour call which is priced at $250

3. Affiliate

She links a lot of products which might be of interest to the audience and that are in sync with the newsletter.

Back in August, Chennel started her paid community.

To maintain quality and engagement, she limited the initial group to 100 members

And she introduced two pricing plans

1. Founding Member: $500 per year

2. VIP Member: $1,500 per year, which includes additional benefits like a custom newsletter audit and quarterly one-on-one sessions with Chenell.

But currently, the price is at $799/Year (for the normal plan)

You can check it out here if you wish to join 🙂 

Should I start my paid community too? What do you think?

Key takeaways

After studying and reading Chennel’s deep dive for quite some time, here are my 3 main takeaways:

1. Writing is 20%, researching is 80%

2. If you mix copywriting and graphics properly, it will be the best combo

3. Newsletter length doesn’t matter, it is all about the quality you’re providing

Thanks for reading today’s edition. I really appreciate you.

I am so excited about my new venture and working on it.

Okay so here is the progress:

1. I bought a different domain for cold emailing

2. Set up my Google workspace

3. Launched it in public

I will keep sharing about it on Twitter/X.

Make sure to follow my journey there.

So I will see you the next week at 10:00 AM sharp.

Till then, byeeee.

Your “email guy” Anirban.

Read my Digital Nomad newsletter here: