Practical Growth Strategies from Marketer Milk

Omid G, creator of Marketer Milk, has a passion for marketing and plenty of great advice to share with beehiiv creators on SEO, newsletter growth, working with influencers, and getting started in affiliate marketing.

Omid’s initial love for marketing expanded to a passion for SEO during his time working at Webflow. Feeling inspired by his newfound interest in SEO, Omid decided to use a sabbatical from his professional career to rebuild his Marketer Milk website into an SEO-first media company. The idea to attach a newsletter to the website was inspired by newsletters like The Hustle and Morning Brew.

"I was hearing the founders of both newsletters in podcasts talk about how much they were making from that business, and it kind of blew my mind. I didn't know you could make millions of dollars a year in the newsletter business."

Omid decided to create something lighter and easier to digest than the standard content-heavy newsletter.

In an effort to fulfill his objective, Marketer Milk shares news and resources but also includes riddles, an 'ad from the past,' and brief marketing insights.

"The newsletter is where I have creative freedom, where I can talk about an insight. I can have fun with it, do my riddles, or post ads. My vision for Marketer Milk was originally a print magazine, so I view my newsletter as a little edition of a magazine every week."

Like a print magazine, Marketer Milk tries to keep its format light and visual. "It's not paragraphs of content-heavy stuff. I try to make it like a giant curated feed of stuff that people can browse through and click on whatever they want. One thing I love about beehiiv is the way it handles embeds. I put the link and it displays a little image. It looks really nice."

Omid's method for building the newsletter has been to drive organic traffic to Marketer Milk through SEO optimization, then invite visitors to subscribe to the newsletter so he could create an owned audience that he can engage with regularly.

"My goal was to create a newsletter [that’s] interactive [with] embedded links and polls. That was a big one for me — I want people to have a reason to click on this email, and the poll seemed like a very good way to increase the click-through rate."

After trying a couple of different platforms and finding them to be a poor fit, Omid discovered beehiiv. "I saw the company name published in a newsletter and thought, 'What the heck is this?' So I looked up who were the founders of this beehiiv company. Given that it was some of the early marketers and employees at Morning Brew, I was already sold. These guys have grown a newsletter to millions of subscribers. They know what features it takes to make that happen."

A Unique SEO Strategy for Affiliates

Omid brought his affiliate marketing background into his relationship with beehiiv. "I've been on [beehiiv's] affiliate platform since it first started. Actually, before beehiiv even had an affiliate program, I reached out to Tyler [Denk, CEO of beehiiv] and said, 'Hey, you guys really need an affiliate program.'"

Having run the affiliate program at Webflow, Omid, shared some ideas about structuring a program for beehiiv. "Then, a few weeks later, I got introduced to EJ [W, beehiiv's senior growth manager] who was spearheading that partner program. I signed up on day one, as soon as the program went live."

Omid followed a unique SEO strategy to create a post about beehiiv that would attract lots of high-converting traffic.

"When I create content on my blog, it's either designed to drive affiliate commissions or to get the attention of a market [who might subscribe to the newsletter.] The beehiiv [post] was driven towards revenue."

But Omid's site was brand new, and the Google results for most email marketing software keywords were already stuffed with established authoritative websites. "I knew there was no chance I was ever going to rank higher than them to rank on the first page, but I really liked beehiiv as a platform, and I wanted to promote it."

"I tried to figure out what I could write that might rank and get a lot of traffic because with affiliate programs if you want to make a decent amount of money, you need a decent amount of traffic. It's a numbers-driven game. So I had to find the balance of a keyword I could rank for, but that has a high enough search volume where I'll make decent money."

"I started using an SEO strategy where, instead of using a keyword research tool, I'd open up Google in an incognito window and type in 'best newsletter…' and then I hit the space bar and see what would auto-populate."

Omid suggested that adding the word 'best' is a good SEO strategy because those types of lists are generally the highest converting for affiliate commissions.

The first auto-populate result he saw was "best newsletter platforms."

"I searched that and saw that every article on that first page were the articles that were ranking for 'newsletter software.' None of them were optimizing around the 'best newsletter platform,' and I had an intuition that if I created this and optimized it around this term, it would rank. And because [that term] is showing up in Google autocomplete, I know that people are searching this in real-time."

According to Omid, keyword research tools sometimes take a long time to pick on search traffic, while Google autocomplete aligns with current trends, making it a handy tool for SEO marketers.

More Advice for Affiliates

While acknowledging that earning a full-time living as an affiliate requires a lot of traffic, Omid thinks it's possible for creators to earn several hundred to a thousand dollars a month as a beehiiv affiliate — especially if they have a good social media presence.

"For example, the best newsletter article I have gets, let's say, a thousand visitors a month. You can create a Twitter or LinkedIn article that goes viral and gets 5,000 hits. If you have your beehiiv link [in the post], you could get a thousand clicks. That one post did the same amount of work an article did in an entire month."

"Social," Omid says, "is huge. Especially when you think about B2B, there's a huge opportunity on LinkedIn. But the way I would think about it is having some sort of website where you link out, instead of going on LinkedIn and linking straight out to beehiiv, create a valuable resource. Maybe, for instance, you create a LinkedIn article about the framework or templates some of the best newsletters use. Write a blog post on your own website, so you can collect their email and then send them your beehiiv affiliate link, or put the link in that article."

According to Omid, building affiliate assets can be very organic. If a creator talks about their newsletter, for instance, it's easy to add an affiliate link and let beehiiv sell itself.

"There's a lot of strategies. You can create assets around newsletter templates, frameworks, or how to structure your newsletter…