Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 2

Welcome. Come on in, don’t be shy. Because this is the best series on the web: Black Swan Street: Building in Public. The weekly series, where every Sunday, we show you a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to build our media empire (mwah-ha-ha).

Quickly, for those who don’t know: What is Black Swan Street? Black Swan Street is a financial media company that’s built on the back of a free email newsletter that provides an in-depth rundown of the most important news throughout the week in the stock market.

If this is something that interests you, subscribe for free here ↓

Alright. Fasten your seatbelts as we take you through the wild, unpredictable, and utterly ridiculous journey of building a media company.

This article will be divided into two sections

• Overview of this week

• Marketing strategies

Overview of this Week

First, we’re going to cover the progress from last week to now in the newsletter and Twitter, as these are the two most important platforms for us.

May 14th:

Twitter:

Newsletter:

May 21st, 1 week later:

Twitter:

Newsletter:

As you can see, this week:

• The Black Swan Street Newsletter added 21 new subscriber, open rate increased 3.4%, and the CTR increased 0.2%.

• Our Twitter added 18 new followers.

Not great, not awful. The one major takeaway here is increases across the board: Great sign, as it shows we’re growing. We’ve been trying some new marketing strategies (we’ll discuss these later) that we’re seeing are working. Throughout this upcoming week, we plan to hone in on these. Hopefully, next week we will see more significant increases across the board.

The most important metric for a newsletter is the open rate. The newsletter we sent out this week was titled “🦢 Disney Scraps $1B Florida Plan?” and we saw a 34.8% open rate for it. This was actually a slight decrease from the previous week’s newsletter, “🦢 U.S. Debt Ceiling Meeting Postponed”, which hard an open rate of 39%.

-4.2% decrease. Nothing to be alarmed about. This is most likely due to the subject line for the email not being as ‘eye-catching’.

Marketing Strategies

This week, we tried a plethora of new marketing strategies in an attempt to grow. The first strategy we tried is revolutionary, forward-thinking, and, if I may, Brilliant. It is:

Twitter Replies

Okay maybe it’s not any of those previous things I just said. If anything it’s actually probably the most simple way to get seen. So why are we doing it?

It works.

Here’s an example of one of our Twitter replies. This may just look like a normal reply to you, but it’s not.

There are a couple of key takeaways here. My reply got 1,300 impressions, 3 likes, and 2 additional replies to my reply. This shows people engaged with my reply. When people are engaging with your content, they likely go to your page, then follow you if they see what they like.

We started doing this later in the week, and it became the main driver of the 18 new Twitter followers.

There is strategy in this though:

• Engage with popular Twitter accounts that have a large following.

• Make sure you engage with Tweets that are performing well.

• Write with substance. Make sure your replies add value to the content.

• Finally, timing matters. It’s extremely important to be one of the first replies.

Let’s move on to our next and best-performing piece of content we put out at Black Swan Street:

The Earnings Graphic

This earnings graphic is the best-performing piece of content we release every week. Earnings graphics for the stock market aren’t anything revolutionary, but where we innovate: including the earnings estimates on the graphic. Every week we release this earnings graphic on our website and advertise it through various platforms like Reddit, Twitter, etc.

Below is the data from google analytics ↓

This post on our website generated 493 views - don’t laugh, that’s good for us. So good in fact, that it makes it one of our most viewed pages.

The Wrap-up

It was a solid week for Black Swan Street. We increased across the board in every important metric and are looking to continue to build on that success in the upcoming weeks.

This entire series is intended to illustrate that growing a business isn’t some overnight thing that platforms like TikTok illustrate it is. It’s a slow and steady grind. It takes time. Something about a tortoise and a hare?

We won’t be stopping until we hit 100,000 subscribers. So join the journey, and help us reach our goal. Subscribe below ↓