Free tool
To grow a newsletter, promote every edition where your readers already spend time, add a method that builds over time, and keep going for at least 30 days. Which methods fit depends on your goal, your time and your budget. Answer five questions to get your plan, then download it as a PDF with a 30 day checklist. It is free and needs no signup.
Example plan
From 150 to 1,000 in 6 months. That is about 5 a day, or about 37% more each month.
Change any answer and the plan changes with it.
For scale: one edition of my own newsletter, promoted with 30 posts, brought 29 new subscribers. That is a single run, not a benchmark.
Best for writers whose readers already use X or LinkedIn.
This week: Put your signup link in your X and LinkedIn bios, then post five times this week, one each weekday.
Letterly can write and schedule these posts for you. See how
Best for your first few dozen subscribers.
This week: List 20 people who would enjoy your newsletter.
Best for writers who already get visitors from somewhere.
This week: Turn your most useful edition into a one-page checklist or template.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
The planner works out two things: the pace your goal needs, and the growth methods that fit your answers. The pace is plain arithmetic. It divides the subscribers you still need by the weeks you have.
The methods are ranked with the Letterly Four-Filter Test. Every method faces the same four filters, in the same order. That includes social posting, the method Letterly automates.
A method that fails a filter waits under "Not yet", with the reason. The platforms you pick move methods up: X or LinkedIn lift social posting, Reddit lifts communities and YouTube lifts SEO and YouTube.
The ratings are my own judgment, the same ones as in my guide on how to grow a newsletter fast. Where a rule uses a number, such as 500 subscribers for recommendations, the number comes from a source listed below.
Your answers stay in your browser, and the PDF is made on your device. The site counts that a plan was made, not what is in it.
The seven main ways to grow a newsletter are social posting, recommendations, a lead magnet, direct outreach, communities, paid ads, and SEO and YouTube. The table holds the ratings the planner uses.
| Method | Time to first subscribers | Cost | Weekly effort | Works with a small list? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social posting | Days to weeks | Free | High, unless automated | Yes |
| Recommendations | Weeks | Free to paid | Low | Better after about 500 subscribers |
| Lead magnet | Weeks, and it needs traffic | Free | One-time build | Yes, but it needs traffic |
| Direct outreach | Days | Free | Medium | Yes |
| Communities | Days to weeks | Free | Medium | Yes |
| Paid ads | Immediate | Paid | Low | Yes, at a cost |
| SEO and YouTube | Months | Free | High | Yes, but it is slow |
My guide on how to grow a newsletter fast explains each rating, with a chart and a real test run.
It depends on your audience and your methods, and nobody can promise you a number. What you can know is the pace your goal needs. Growing from 150 to 1,000 subscribers in six months takes 33 new subscribers a week.
Newsletter Operator says that if you post consistently for 30 or more days, your content gets better and you start to get engagement. That is why every plan here runs for 30 days before you judge it.
For scale, here is one real run. I promoted one edition of my own newsletter, Notes to 10K MRR, with 30 posts made by Letterly. It brought 29 new subscribers. That is a sample of one, not a benchmark.
All four platforms let you recommend other newsletters to your new subscribers, so that those newsletters can recommend you back. Only the details differ.
Newsletter Operator suggests swapping recommendations once you pass 500 subscribers. That is why the planner holds them back until then.
Print the PDF, or keep it where you will see it every week.
Do your three methods every week, and change nothing for a month.
See where your new subscribers came from. Keep what worked, drop what did not, and make a new plan.
To go deeper, read how to grow a newsletter fast, which ranks the seven methods in detail. If social posting is on your plan, my guide to the best tools to turn a newsletter into social media posts compares six ways to do it. There are more guides on the Letterly blog.
Start with people you know and the places your readers already spend time. Write to people who would enjoy it, and promote every edition on social media with a signup link. Newsletter Operator says 70 to 80% or more of your first 1,000 subscribers come from social.
Take the subscribers you still need and divide them by the weeks you have. Going from 150 to 1,000 in six months takes 33 new subscribers a week. The planner does this sum for your own numbers.
Yes. It is free, needs no signup and runs in your browser, and so does the PDF download. Your answers are not sent anywhere.
A PDF of four or five pages. It has your plan and the answers it came from, a 30 day checklist with a box for every task, a weekly tracker with a target for each week, a day 30 review and the sources. If social posting is on your plan, it adds a posting log. It is made on your device and is not uploaded.
It runs the Letterly Four-Filter Test: speed, cost, weekly effort and size. A method that fails one of the four waits under "Not yet". The rest are ranked by how well they fit your answers.
Newsletter Operator suggests starting with five posts a week, one on each weekday, and keeping that up for 30 days.
Newsletter Operator suggests swapping recommendations once you pass about 500 subscribers. beehiiv, Substack, Kit and Ghost all have a recommendations feature.
Only if you have a budget and a way to earn it back. Newsletter Operator says paid ads work much better after you have traction, subscribers and revenue from your newsletter.
Yes. The methods work on any newsletter platform. Only the name of the recommendations feature changes.
Yes. Letterly reads each new edition from your RSS feed, writes posts in your voice and publishes them to X, LinkedIn, Threads and Facebook. It costs $29 a month, and the first seven days are free.
Founder of Letterly
Vicente writes Notes to 10K MRR, a weekly build-in-public newsletter on beehiiv, alongside university and a part-time job. Every edition went out on time, and the social posts that were supposed to follow it never did.
He built Letterly to write those posts for him. It started as an idea on 26 November 2024, and the first version shipped in January 2025. Letterly is built and run by one person, and Vicente answers support email himself.
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