Riches in the niches.

If you’re a creator who dreams of building a business with a niche newsletter, you won’t want to miss this Creator Spotlight!

The NoCodeDevs Newsletter has grown to 8,000 readers in a tight niche, which is no easy feat. It's also successfully monetizing that audience with steady advertising without doing a lot of sales outreach work, which is a dream for many newsletters.

How are they making that growth and revenue happen? We sat down with Art West, who leads the project. He shared insights on his process to help other creators looking to develop powerful content and monetization strategies.

In this post, we will cover:

• Building a niche into a professional business.

• Turning into a curation-based newsletter into a monetized asset.

• The process behind creating such an engaged newsletter.

• Advice for new creators.

Let's get into it! To subscribe, check out No Code Devs here:

A Curated Guide

NoCodeDevs is an online directory of no-code tools that also offers educational workshops, events, and tutorials. The company’s mission is to help creators, business owners, and employees who don't have a technical background learn about the no-code resources that are available to help them grow, scale, and automate their businesses.

According to West, the newsletter lets the NoCodeDevs team keep their audience up to date on the industry. "With so much going on, it's hard to keep tabs on what's happening in the space. All these platforms are constantly updating and shipping new features. So we use the newsletter to keep our audience up to date with everything that's happening, not only with our partners but also the general no-code SaaS community at large."

For a niche audience, their coverage manages to span a variety of topics. "We cover platform-specific updates for the most popular tools that are most interesting to our users. So, for instance, if Notion adds an AI feature that's wildly popular, we'll cover that. But more generally, we cover industry updates, trends, and new tools that are emerging into the space."

8,000 Subscribers and Growing

The NoCodeDevs Newsletter team has produced about 300 issues and has just under 8,000 subscribers. "It's been growing really well," says West. "Especially recently. Ever since we came to beehiiv, it's been growing really, really great."

Like many newsletters, the primary driver of growth for NoCodeDevs has been social media. "Generally, we source most of our subscribers from Twitter and a little bit from other social platforms — namely YouTube. We're very active on Twitter, so we're able to capture a lot of [subscribers] from plugging the newsletter on some of our bigger content pieces on Twitter."

A Content Strategy for Growth & Engagement

Like many newsletters, NoCodeDevs started using its newsletter to mirror its social media content. But over time, the content strategy has evolved into something more comprehensive and engaging.

"When we first started, [the content] was a lot of tutorials we were making and updates to features within our own community. So, for instance, if we added a forum or a new webinar, that was essentially the content in our newsletter. So what [our audience] was seeing on our Twitter was exactly the same as what they were seeing on our YouTube and then our newsletter. And I think that stalled our growth a bit."

Shifting gears made a huge difference.

"What really made the shift towards growth and accumulating subscribers was going beyond our own updates and sourcing content from the greater community at large. We curate news from hundreds of sources and then choose the most interesting content to feature in our newsletter. We do the curation so [our readers] don't have to sift through thousands of articles to find the most interesting pieces of content."

The content shift has not only helped build readership, but also increased engagement and community. "We intentionally leave knowledge gaps in the newsletter, which creates some curiosity and a reason to engage. People often reply directly to the newsletter because they have a question or they're curious about something, and then we can engage with them in that way."

"We do a wide range of different polls through the newsletter, which is really a helpful engagement tool to not only survey our audience but to get them engaged in interacting with the content to see what they find interesting. And then we can repurpose that knowledge to use in our greater community. "

The Curation Process

In order to provide readers with helpful content, the NoCodeDevs team continuously collects information, feeding directly into the beehiiv platform. Their goal is to curate the best information, then present it in a way that encourages the reader to engage with the content.

The team consists of about five people, with two of them working specifically on the newsletter.

"I have somebody who generally curates and sources the information for the newsletter and then, as a team, we'll piece it all together," says West.

“We send our newsletter weekly, so throughout the week we put everything in beehiiv. When it comes time to get to the final draft, we'll move everything around and trim out the things that are not as interesting. Then we'll rewrite the headlines and things to create those knowledge gaps to get people to click on the links and engage with the content — even reply to us if they're really looking for more information."

Monetization Through Advertising

When it comes to monetization, the NoCodeDevs newsletter and website work together to attract advertising partners. "There are SaaS companies that want to get in front of our audience. We have different packages for them, ranging from a single newsletter ad to a bundled package where they get a featured listing on our website and an ad in our newsletter. So we monetize it that way, with what we call a partner but is essentially an advertiser. And then we also are part of the beehiiv advertiser network, so we run some ads through that network as well."

NoCodeDevs isn't making any outbound sales efforts to find potential advertisers. Instead, the advertisers are finding them. "It's people either organically discovering our social content and then linking through to the newsletter, or people finding it organically. Because we post the newsletter to a URL, people find the content through typical web searches."

The team has developed an approach to selling ads more efficiently, though. "We realized at some point that whether you work with an advertiser for a single ad or a series of ads, it's generally the same amount of work. So we've moved away from focusing on a single advertiser for a single issue because it's the same amount of work as an advertiser that will advertise for two months. We've put an emphasis on ad packages for the newsletter that are 30 days or longer. So you get a spot in four or more issues of our newsletter, essentially. That's freed up a lot of our time. And it's also attracted more serious advertisers."

Advice for Creators

West has some advice for creators who want to capture more inbound advertising. "Even if you have, say, 4,000 subscribers, make it easy for your current readers to find out how to advertise in your newsletter. A lot of newsletters don't do this, but you need to have a link in your newsletter that sends them to a page, whether it be a deck page or just a general information page on your website where they can get more information about what advertising looks like in your newsletter."

West says that by providing ad info on your site, "you can eliminate many initial objections and questions people might have. They can self-learn and get their own information without having to get on a call and talk — many people are intimidated by that or just want to do their own research. So I think giving the information is super important."

"And to take it a step further, you can even, as we have, offer a place where they can actually purchase an ad through a form. We capture all the information we need, so when they come in as an advertiser, we have all the assets, copy, UTMs — everything we would need to onboard them as an advertiser.

West says this strategy makes things easier for both teams. “That reduces the amount of time it takes to work with potential advertisers. If you don't have the resources to reach out, you need to streamline it as much as possible to reduce the load of work you're going to be doing when you bring on an advertiser. Because [onboarding new advertisers] is a lot of back and forth, a lot of conversation, a lot of work."

Another tip West has for new creators is to be prepared to answer questions about audience demographics. "One of the questions we got over and over and over again was, 'What does your audience look like? What are the demographics?' And if you don't have answers to those questions, that'll turn away a lot of potential advertisers. So being able to capture that information using beehiiv forms when they come in as a subscriber is important because, first, you know more about your audience to curate the type of content they want to see. But secondly, you can also provide that information to advertisers."

All things considered, this pre-planning pays off in more ways than one.

"Knowing your audience is so important," West stresses. "I can't emphasize that enough if you want to monetize. Because 90% of your potential advertisers will ask what your demographics look like. We've even used some third-party tools like Clearbit to enrich our user list, so we have specific information that we can provide [to advertisers]. I think investing in things like that can help [a creator] level up and scale from both a content side and an advertiser side. Knowing your audience is the most important thing to keep engagement — clicks and readership — as high as possible."

A Guiding Light

Perhaps West is so generous with offering monetization advice to new creators because he also draws a lot of inspiration from others.

"I'm a pretty avid newsletter subscriber, so I definitely get pieces of inspiration from all the different newsletters I read. I use the discovery tool within beehiiv to get exposure to new newsletters, to see what they're doing, what works, and what kind of content is resonating with their audience — even if it's a different audience altogether."

It's really helpful to see what other people are doing. Especially when they're using the same ESP that I am, because I know what they're doing is within the platform's limitations. I've followed some of the bigger newsletters on the beehiiv network — Milk Road has been an inspiration for sure — and look at them as a guiding light."

Future Plans

Looking ahead, West says, "We're really focused on growth. Prior to coming to beehiiv, we were using another platform, and we hit a period of stagnant growth where we weren't seeing a lot of new subscribers. It was frustrating. One of the things you always have to do is iterate. I think it's important to always remember that what you're doing now might not be the best way tomorrow. So we're using AB testing to see what resonates with our audience."

"We have some goals in mind," West says. "We're looking at 10,000 as our next big number, which is a couple thousand more subscribers from where we're at. But as a niche newsletter, a couple thousand more subscribers is a big uptick in growth for us. So we're focused on using the tools available within beehiiv to reach these growth metrics."

If you want to see these plans develop, subscribe here:

West is also interested in using beehiiv's data enrichment tools to better understand and segment its customer lists. "It's a really big thing because as we grow, we're getting advertisers outside of just the no-code space. If they're a financial company, for instance, they may want to target CEOs. So it's really helpful to have that segmented list so we can reach those people, or at least tell advertisers that we have those types of people in our list."

Part of the NoCodeDev team's approach to future growth is to continue evolving the content strategy. "We're working on changing our newsletter style to be more casual, fun, and lighthearted, and we want to use that as a stepping stone for engagement. We've found that presenting our readers with information and facts is great, but people also want to be entertained.”

Continually evaluating strategy and being adaptable to change is crucial. “There's a lot of competition out there, a lot of other apps and platforms where people can digest information in a fun way. So we're working on changing up our content to make it more fun, more engaging — using more gifs and more rich media embedded in a newsletter that people can still read if they want to, but if they want it to be more scannable and fun, they can also approach it from that angle."

You can see some of this scannable content in action in recent issues of The NoCodeDevs newsletter. Check out Rise of the Robots, an issue about AI developments, or 185 Tools to Build Your Dream Saas. You can also learn more about NoCodeDevs by visiting their website or Twitter.