Peter Cooper, the founder of an email newsletter network with over 500,000 subscribers,  describes how he built his network and how it's changed over the past 10 years. He also shares his belief on how to best cultivate an audience and keep them loyal.

Key Points from this Episode: `

• Peter saw a need for email-first communication in his niche and he got his start before someone else beat him to it. He pitched it to his current list and it grew from there. 
• Ruby Weekly, Peter's newsletter started out as a way for him to sell his online courses and he pivoted to include sponsorships as an alternate source of income. 
• Using Facebook's domino strategy to build a similar group of publications like JavaScript Weekly and others, as well and they all slightly overlap each other. 
• When you need to build something, build from the well of your current audiences and lean on the audience of someone else. 
• Building trust creates a subscriber who will then move on to your different publications. 
• With Peter's publications, they try to provide justifications for why they have linked to certain things and as to why something is newsworthy or interesting.
• Decide if you want to have a specific or general personality with your newsletters. 
• Coming up with systems for your business can help you be prepared for the unexpected.

Tweetables:

At the end of the day, I'm running a business that I want to keep running for 20, 30 years. So there's going to be a lot of boring time in that. It's not all going to be fun and sunshine and rainbows. @PeterC (00:32)

Look at what you're doing and what's working, but then think about what those people also do, who they also mingle with, what are the kinds of, of domino effects you can bring into your thing. @PeterC (08:43))

When I need to build something, I kind of go and drink from that well that I've nurtured and made work over time. @PeterC (11:59)

Software engineering is a space where you do tend to trust people's opinions more on why they're sharing news with you perhaps more than just having a fire hose of stuff in your topic space. @PeterC (19:20)

Email, which originally was less intimate is now actually becoming a more intimate format in this modern kind of 2018 last Renaissance of the email newsletter. @PeterC (20:38)

Links Mentioned In This Episode:

Peter Cooper on LinkedIn

Peter Cooper on Twitter

Cooper Press

Ruby Weekly

JavaScript Weekly

Jason L. Baptiste

Hacker News

Help a Reporter Out

Groupon

Living Social

Mailchimp

Tech Crunch

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