Paid Ads Strategy of an Exploding AI Newsletter

💬 Anthony Castrio tweeted in September last year…

Starting a new daily newsletter.

Going to grow it from 0 to 10,000 subscribers and start to monetize as fast as inhumanly possible.

I’ll be building the whole thing in public right here ⬇️

Now, almost 11 months later, his daily newsletter about AI called Bot Eat Brain has 24,000+ subscribers 😎

Anthony charges as much as $1999 for a sponsorship package and recently tweeted…

Passed $5k in ad revenue for August so far. Stretch goal is $6k. I think we’ll hit it.

It took 6 months for Anthony to get his first 1000 subscribers 😕

Then he started tinkering with paid ads…

Now I understand why Facebook is a billion-dollar company. After running a profitable ad, my first thought was:

“Now, exactly how fast can I give them all the money that I have?”

Next, he did something unusual 👇

I sold 20% of the Bot Eat Brain newsletter to @DBogachek for $10,000.

A couple of weeks later he wrote…

My AI newsletter @BotEatBrain just passed 5,000 subscribers. We’ve added more than 2,000 new subscribers in the last 10 days.

I reckon a huge part of this was running ads funded by that $10,000 injection.

This seems to be when the newsletter really took off 🚀

Anthony’s response when asked about his biggest growth contributor….

Right now paid ads are #1 followed by word of mouth and shoutouts in other newsletters.

He also tweeted recently…

I spent over $10,000 on Facebook Ads last month.

I got back over $7,000 from Sparkloop.

My effective paid CPA for new readers is about $0.25 cents.

I make about $0.40 cents per reader per month.

You do the math.

This is why newsletters are exploding.

The way Sparkloop works: you get a popup after you sign up for Bot Eat Brain suggesting other newsletters to subscribe to; if you go ahead, Anthony gets paid for that referral 🤑

Sparkloop recommendations can also be links inside the newsletter. See the “recommended reading” section in a recent Bot Eat Brain newsletter.

Lastly, given how instrumental Facebook ads have been for growing Anthony’s newsletter, you might want to check out his ads here 👈

Looks like he’s been running one primary ad since June, nothing fancy, just simple text.

But I bet Anthony experimented with lots of ads before landing on that one as the most effective 🤓