I’m planning to work less this summer. I don’t always take a break in the summer, but the older I get, the more tired I am and the more I lean into times when other people are also more likely to be offline.

If you want to go hard this summer, you definitely can. The entire world is online more than ever and there’s always people paying attention. Plus, it’s not summer everywhere.

But if you want to lift off the gas a bit, you can set up a promotion plan that helps you grow while you take a step back, at least from the marketing side. Today, I share 5 things I’m gonna make sure I have in place before I head down to my month long birthday party in Mexico.

Also, in this issue, some of my petty beefs! 🥩 Come for the tips, stay for the gossip.

P.S. I’m working on a series about reader referral programs. Do you have a successful strategy that worked to get readers sharing? I want to hear it. Reply and tell me about it!

5 passive promotion tools you need

1️⃣ An email ask for bumping up tiers

Your fastest path to revenue is often through subscribers who already pay you. I wrote about this with RANGE’s member drive last August—they were surprised at how many existing members upgraded and how many lapsed members came back.

Send an email to your monthly subscribers and ask them to go annual or lifetime. You can do this with a segment inside your newsletter on a timed automation or you can download monthly subscribers from Stripe and use a mail merge tool like Mail Merge for Gmail and do a one time ask.

Especially for subscribers who are past month 8 with you, they save money and you save time chasing down failed payments and churned readers.

Shout out to my new Lifetime Legends who’ve recently backed me at this level: Lynn, Dan, Devin, Jessica, Deanna, Laura, Kari, Sarah, Will, Christopher, Vicky, Alyssa, Kara, Rey and Bryan.

2️⃣ Automatic reminders to join your newsletter

It’s hard to automate all social media but you can automate reminders to “join my newsletter” and “become a subscriber” on your social channels. Particularly on Twitter, Bluesky and Threads.

You need to get a social media scheduler that has a recycling/recurring posts feature. I recently started using Publer (this is my affiliate link and it gets you 10% off) which does this well on Bluesky. You can also look at Hypefury or Tweethunter, if you primarily use Twitter.

Load in at least 10 variations of “join my newsletter” and “become a subscriber” and set them to post a few times a week. Hypefury has a neat feature where it will add an “autoplug” after your most popular posts based on likes or retweets, but it doesn’t work on Bluesky. Publer has a recycling feature that also pulls in your latest posts so you can just grab them and set them to recycle. You can also use this to keep promoting new stories for a few weeks.

3️⃣ Automated new subscriber posts on social

You can send a social post out every time someone gets a subscription.

If you’re getting paid subscribers every minute, this might be a bit much, but if you get just a couple a day, this will do wonders for you. I was blown away at how well this worked to drive new subscribers and tips on my Buy Me a Coffee page. One of the coolest things is that new subscribers will grab these posts and add a testimonial to them like Legend Alyssa Towns did here for me.

Why this works: it makes more people on social media aware of your subscriptions AND ALSO it adds social proof that others are buying in. You can use Zapier to do this and I wrote the recipe here for my paid subscribers.

4️⃣ At least 1 automated Why Pay email

Too many of us are making a pitch for the paid subscription in our welcome emails and then never again.

I’d make sure you have at least one delayed “Why Pay” email. The timing of this depends on your publishing cadence and also on how much trust you have with your audience before they join your list. I’d estimate somewhere between 6 to 12 weeks post-sign up.

Use Outpost to do this if you’re on Ghost. They already have it set up for you in their Autoresponder tool. You can see I don’t have all of these on yet, but you can bet I’m gonna turn them on before I go away!

beehiiv, Kit and Buttondown all have automation capabilities and you can set up one automated email or a series of them. Substack doesn’t have a way to do this because they suck but you can use Zapier to pump your readers over to another tool for this purpose. A lot of people do Substack + Kit.

5️⃣ An incentive that gets readers sharing your links

If you’re doing less marketing, lean on your readers to market for you. This is always a good idea, but it’s even more useful if you’re reducing your work schedule.

There’s lots of ways to do this. Incentives can range from offering individual rewards (“get a discount to our merch store”) to offering a collective incentive (“if we hit 50000 readers, I will XYZ…”). Even things like making issues easy and fun to post, by ensuring they look nice on social media and have a subscribe CTA in case someone hits the link cold, can encourage readers to share. Of course, you can just ask too!

We’re going to dig into referrals and word of mouth more soon, but check out Partnero (pretty busted software but very cheap and has killer support) and Sparkloop (less busted software but still busted with an asshole founder who won’t give you your money back if it doesn’t function. Louis, if you’re reading this, this is why I don’t like you or your product).

Or if you’re using Buttondown or beehiiv, referral tracking is a built-in feature. Kit owns Sparkloop so it’s built in there too.

Take it slow without slowing down your revenue

Everything I recommended above is good to do year round, but it’s even more important to have some of these systems in place if you’re stepping away. Pick 2 of them and schedule some time on your calendar to set them up before you head out for summer vacation. And by that, I mean before watching your kids have a summer vacation.

I mentioned a bunch of tools in this post. Find all my tool recommendations on my Toolkit page. If you use my affiliate links, it helps fund the free version of this newsletter, at no extra cost to you.

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