[FOLLOW ALONG] What The Aff… - A Daily Newsletter For Affiliates (58)
[FOLLOW ALONG] What The Aff… - A Daily Newsletter For Affiliates
Whaddup STMers,
I’ll try to keep this whole intro post short.
I’m working on a daily (workdays at least) newsletter for affiliates of all levels of experience. It’s called What The Aff… and you can find it at wtaff.co. It’s a short, carefully curated newsletter (5 mins read time) with affiliate marketing news, cool tech and actionable advice.
It’s perhaps easier to show a few samples from the past week:
Monday, April 9
Tuesday, April 10
Wednesday, April 11
Thursday, April 12
Friday, April 13
Today's issue will be sent out at 13:00 CEST.
But... why?!
I’ve seen the concept successfully done for business newsletters - my favourite and the one I’m taking most cues from being Morning Brew (morningbrew.com) Haven’t seen anything like this in AM but I’d like to read something similar for this industry.
I’m still at a very early stage - I’ve only shown this to a few people in the industry I personally know. And this is an early preview for STM Forum members 
I want to make this a different kind of follow-along. One where there’s more than just some ads and stats shown and then as soon as something gets profitable, the sharing stops... especially because the product is made for the people following along.
Since this is a very early release, there’s plenty left to do. First things that come to mind:
Onboarding of new subscribers - there's nothing yet
Social media presence - there is none yet
Public launch and collabs - this is the first time I mention it in a public forum or group or anything. I think it's best to have an official, bigger launch in the near future, once a few kinks are ironed out. It seems the sort of product that can benefit greatly from word of mouth marketing.
Website improvements - it's just one page now, I think it needs more info on past newsletter, testimonials, etc.
Revenue stream - probably some sponsored section but want to make it fit in and add value to the experience for the user, not hurt it. Last on the list anyway.
I won’t be able to update this daily, but I’ll take the time at least once a week to write up a more thorough update on performance (new sign ups, open rate, click rate, etc.) along with my thoughts. Even though the list only has a handful of people, I still get slightly nervous when clicking that final Send button.
For now, would appreciate you checking it out and giving your feedback, both as a reader and as a list builder 
Off to celebrate my birthday! Will reply to any comments after waking up, haha.
Thanks,
Manu.
Great idea and happy birthday! The industry could definitely use more newsletters like this. I believe there's another newsletter like this by some of the STM guys, just can't place it right now.
Are you doing this all by your lonesome? How are you able to keep this up basically? I'm impressed!
Out of curiosity what are your go-to sites for staying up to date? Hackernews is a big one for me, but that's about it.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
Do you mean MRKTRS? I think the overlap is just the affiliate audience. They have a digital nomad lifestyle weekly newsletter as one part of their offer. What I'm trying to do is replace the "morning paper" with a 5 min email.
Not alone - everyone on the team shares links they think are relevant, another team member writes the first draft, then I do final edits and send it out. I'm still worried about days when nothing relevant happens, then it's tough to put out any good content. Have only done like 10 newsletters so far. Early on (2 weeks ago, lol, made it sound like years ago) it was just a Google Doc for us to see what content we can have. It's not the only thing me and my team are doing
When it comes to sites - I follow some big papers on Twitter, and when I see anything that could be relevant for the industry, I check it more in depth. I think it's vital to add an affiliate spin to news articles, and not just aggregate links. I don't follow Hackernews for this, seems way more SV tech focused than marketing.
I think this idea can provide a lot of value to the industry. Having been one of the earlier individuals to receive the newsletter, Emanuel and his team are off to a solid start.
Two interesting questions that members of STM could answer to help out Emanuel would be...
1. What other websites do affiliates and stm members currently follow to stay updated on what is happening?
2. Why do you follow those specifically? What value do you get from it that makes it worthy to follow?
I like to follow http://adage.com and keep tabs on the advertising and marketing industry as a whole. You'd be surprised by the ideas that you can get from seeing what some of the big agencies or companies are doing. While alot of their articles have now gone to click bait style or low relevance articles, there is good information shared from time to time that I find very insightful.
And the occassional laugh.. like the Zuck GIF Report: http://adage.com/article/media/miss-...nicely/313071/
Andrew
Thanks for the encouragement Andrew.
I think the 2 questions are very good when put together. To be honest, if someone would ask me that I wouldn't know what exactly to answer - for me it was various sources that get shared on social media, and once in a while checking news websites. That was just a big time sink as you can imagine. Anyway...
I've noticed a few people subscribed yesterday after I posted this so thank you for that! Hope you'll enjoy the newsletter. Will give a progress report on the weekend - more time and more data then.
Nice work Manu! I will definitely be checking this out every day - it looks really solid!
Belated happy birthday Manu!
This post on newsletters is definitely going into this week's newsletter! 
Amy
Thanks Amy!
Update time!
Managed to keep up with sending daily. Not always smooth but in the end we manage to have good content to send out. The feedback's been quite encouraging - people are opening, reading, clicking links. I also got the same feedback when talking in private. Two companies,
Week 1 numbers:
86 subscribers - Just word of mouth. Most public space where this project has been mentioned is STM Forum.
70% open rate - Not everyone opens daily and I assume some emails get lost in spam and promo. Will add a better message after subscribing and an initial welcome email with instructions to avoid both those issues.
20% click rate - Don't know what to make of it. My goal is to have people get their news without having to click but I'm glad to see people are interested to learn more about the curated topics.
Left to do for week 1:
- onboarding messages
- Facebook page
Week 2 goals:
1. Make it public across all channels. Proper launch.
2. Get 5 testimonials/recommendations - If you like it and want to help here, let me know! I'm looking for what I call "tweet length" quotes - 1-2 lines that I can easily feature on the homepage.
3. Pass 200 subscribers - would be easy if I didn't care about quality, could just spam it around and buy some cheap traffic for it. Doesn't make sense to do that.
FEEDBACK I NEED:
One thing that is pretty clear to me at the moment is that I have to show samples to people before they consider signing up. I'm trying to figure out an engaging way to do that on Facebook and I have 2 video types in mind:
Option 1 , simple vertical phone scrolling through the email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3bGP1E1ngA
Option 2, a phone on a desk, which looks nicer and can have more messaging on it but could also distract from the newsletter itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDZ7uCLJbD0
Which of the 2 do you like more? Just mentioning that the goal is not to make it so readable that you don't sign up to the newsletter - instead, the goal is to show enough from inside that you want to sign up to read it.
I'm also looking for a way to make a short intro video, for somewhat cold traffic. Again 2 ideas for it.
One is going on the "it's so awesome, everyone is reading it, even the US military" angle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9eYNn0syE4
The other is going on the idea of cutting out all the noise from social media and go with What The Aff... instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbO0DGdlgF4
Neither of those scream out to me as super good. I'm also uncertain how much people care about social media noise, PLUS how likely are they do watch any ad if they are on their noisy FB newsfeeds.
I will probably end up testing all, but thought it's good to show the videos to everyone here and get some input.
Cheers,
Manu.
PS: I will be heading to Prague on Sunday for the Crypto Affiliate Conference, so if you are in town, hit me up and maybe we can meet for a drink!
Read few of the newsletters.
I really liked it. It's written very-well, and most importantly I found most of the content you sent very relevant to us (affiliates).
Keep it up, I love it.
Originally Posted by mation
Very glad to hear you liked it!
I like that desk video as it seems quite relevant to the newsletter style. You can also try some of these app promo templates found on places like Videohive for a greater "WOW" effect on FB, they shouldn't be too difficult to modify:
https://videohive.net/item/stylish-a...p-kit/20842282
https://videohive.net/item/phone-x-app-promo/20871264
Looking nice!
Thanks guys!
Those templates look interesting, Shishev. I think I can just tell my designer to whip up something similar for my purpose.
Good one Manu,
Keep it roll-in.
Good work Manu!
Read a few of the newsletters and really liked the content. Thumbs up for the What The Aff... is reading section
Update time!
Week 2 numbers:
266 subscribers - More than I thought but some friends helped spread the word.
60% open rate - dropped a little but not very surprised after the big increase in subscribers.
15% click rate - this varies significantly by how much I emphasize a link should be clicked.
What were the week 2 goals:
1. Make it public across all channels. Proper launch. - Check
2. Get 5 testimonials/recommendations - Check - Thanks for the help with this one! STM rocks!
3. Pass 200 subscribers - Check
Facebook page is up but I have a tough time figuring out what sort of content to post constantly. It's really just a showcase for the newsletter and to run FB Ads for now.
Onboarding messages also done, so if you subscribe now, you will get a few lines instead of just "Thank You!" and also a welcome email. Both the Thank You page and the welcome email explain what's going to happen next and what to do to ensure the emails are not delivered to Spam or Promo or whatever other obscure place.
At Shishev's suggestion, I asked for a fancier video which some of you might have seen posted on FB but if you haven't, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykk-0co9hA8
I'm also running it as a FB ad to a cold audience. Not doing great.
The one doing reasonably well ($2/lead) is the video named "Various screens" from my previous update. This seems to introduce people much better to the concept. I will still do the daily newsletter videos for now and start using them in retargeting campaigns for people that engaged but didn't subscribe. I need to work on more videos for audiences who first come in contact with this through an ad.
Week 3 goals:
1. 450 subscribers.
2. Test 3 more video concepts for cold audiences.
3. Create a list of affiliate influencers to contact for collaboration. Personal recommendation/word of mouth is clearly still the biggest driver of subscriptions. It's hard to judge whether or not this is something you want to get unless people who've seen it daily for a while recommend it. I need to connect with others who have email lists with affiliates that are open for some sort of collaboration and give What The Aff... a shoutout.
HELP I COULD USE:
If you have an email list populated with affiliate industry contacts I'd love to have a chat. Or, if you know someone well enough that you can make a personal intro, it would also be much appreciated. Facebook groups or a big personal following, without an email list, are also very helpful.
Thanks in advance,
Manu.
Hello Manu! First of all, I hope that you had a wonderful birthday
And secondly, we would like to express our gratitude for the work you have done. It is a great contribution to the business, which surely will give a great hand in the races of being updated for many affiliates. Hope a huge success will find What the aff.. already in the nearest future!
And secondly, we would like to express our gratitude for the work you have done. It is a great contribution to the business, which surely will give a great hand in the races of being updated for many affiliates. Hope a huge success will find What the aff.. already in the nearest future!
Hope the
Wow, already over 450 subscribers! Thanks everyone who spread the word and helped out! Guess I have to set bigger goals.
The longer update will come on the weekend! I'm away from Vienna, so next newsletters are from being written from the lakeside.
Testing the new STM Forums app... Looks pretty slick and it's intuitive to post.
For those on Android, you can grab it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...mforumcomforum
Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using STM Forums mobile app
LE: Didn't know it adds the signature at the end but can be deactivated easily.
Regular update time!
Week 3 stats:
505 subscribers - a bit over the goal, sub count slows down significantly on the weekend.
60% open rate - rather consistent, happy with that!
Click rate just depends so much on how much I emphasize the need to click certain links. Can go between 7% to 25%.
Week 3 goals and results:
1. 450 subscribers - Check.
2. Test 3 more video concepts for cold audiences. - Unfortunately the tests didn't perform too well. It seems rather difficult to do "direct response" for this newsletter. There's no immediate benefit, like a lead magnet so in order for people to sign up they need to understand what is it they are signing up to much more. Stopping Facebook Ads to cold audiences for now.
3. Influencers - Got a list, some helped reach the current subscriber numbers, more to work with and some secret ideas on the topic.
This was the first week anyone unsubscribed from the newsletter, and it was only a couple of people who signed up without having seen a previous newsletter.
It's also a week where I got people messaging how awesome the whole thing is - people I've never spoken with before.
Week 4 goals:
1. 650 subscribers.
2. Better sharing/forwarding for each email. People like but it's not easy enough to share it, nor is it that obvious how to subscribe after you read it from a friend's share.
3. Customized un-subscribe flow - need to gather more relevant info on why people unsubscribe, instead of the standard template.
Update: not just smooth sailing!
Until this week, everything went super well. This is the first week when not everything went as planned.
Week 4 goals and results:
1. 650 subscribers. Nope. Only 557, on the upside it just existing subs referring new ones basically.
2. Better sharing - Done. Changed a few things, and added a nice Newsletter Archive section right here: https://www.wtaff.co/newsletter-archive
3. Custom un-sub flow. Nope. Didn't know you can't just edit the default flow and it's too much effort to do more now because people don't unsubscribe.
Stats:
557 subscribers - under the goal.
Open rate - This is a weird one. From one day to the other it went from over 60% on average per email to 45%. It seems Gmail might have made some updates or enough emails have been sent now that there are more filters in place.
I researched the topic, focusing on delivering to Primary Inbox and made more changes. Now there's more focus on adding our email to the main inbox on the thank you page (included the same GIF and reminded people to click "Yes!" because they tend to forget when I asked some friends who started getting the email in their Promotions tab). I also have a list of dos and don'ts for subject lines, though most I already knew.
I've also adjusted the sending time - it will now be scheduled for 11:00 GMT, so the more avid readers know exactly when to check for it, regardless of what inbox it's in.
On the upside, had the first sponsored email on Friday, so thank you to the
There've also been more inquiries regarding this so I think sponsorships to also monetize the newsletter is something very much doable.
I have to leave Week 5 goals secret this time, but I will update on other progress as it happens. 
Early update time!
Just scheduled today's email - the final one for the week and it feels goooood!
During the week, I reached out to a few names in the industry that have their own affiliate audience and got some shoutouts from Kulwant and Johnny FD which boosted numbers nicely. Big thanks to both of them!
Still ongoing talks with others for some extra exposure
Open rates have still been varying a bit more than in the early days, going between 48% and 57%. Still getting a few late opens and clicks so just about all emails end up with >50% open rate, some pushing again towards 60%, even as the list grew. Have to say that's quite nice!
I have one more change to make for the emails to push the open rate a bit higher: the preview text. Right now it's just grabbing the default, which always starts with the date and notice to view in browser if images are broken. One of my weekend tasks is go through a few articles on how to change it to what I want for every email. This can complement the subject line very well and could push that open rate to over 50% consistently.
Need to get some food and rest now. It's been a long grind this week but worth it!
So how many subscribers do you have now?
Originally Posted by matuloo
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Originally Posted by matuloo
Very excited for the next few weeks!
You know what time it is...
It's been just over a month that I made this project public. STM and a few others got a look at it a week early.
This week, we broke 1500 readers and now are sitting at 1579 subscribers! Not just that but the feedback's been absolutely amazing. Can't thank everyone enough!
You know when you're an affiliate, you sometimes forget there's a thing as a real testimonial... So just check what the readers said about WHAT THE AFF.
Average open rate decreased only slightly, going between 42 and 53%.
At the same time, although average open rate decreased a bit, the weekly engagement stays very high, >90% of people opened at least one email in the last week.
The coming week I'll be heading to Bucharest for the affiliate meetup happening there on the 31st May and staying a few days. I'm also working on a clear offer for those interested in sponsoring the newsletter.
It's a big week - I think I have clear confirmation the audience likes the product, now let's see if quality, value adding sponsors like it too - enough to get featured in it. Fingers crossed for that!
Congrats on your initial success, it's growing nicely!
I like the idea and I think this model can work.
Remind me https://thehustle.co/ which is similar concept, but for broader audience.
That one I think it's $M+ project already.
Wish you all the best Manu, let's get to 5k now!
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
I like the idea and I think this model can work.
Remind me https://thehustle.co/ which is similar concept, but for broader audience.
That one I think it's $M+ project already.
Wish you all the best Manu, let's get to 5k now!
There are quite a few successful case studies for the newsletter model - more than I would have thought 6 months ago.
I also have ideas for what other niches could work for this but it's early days to think about that - that's a topic for pretty far in the future though.
I didn't know Morning Brew, going to check it out.
Now I see it's truly your inspiration, comparing the LPs, haha
Do you have links to any of those case studies? I would love to read them.
Originally Posted by erikgyepes
Now I see it's truly your inspiration, comparing the LPs, haha
Do you have links to any of those case studies? I would love to read them.
You can also check out past newsletters from Morning Brew here: https://www.morningbrew.com/latest/archive/
Yeah, I started with their style, but will adjust over time
They have over 200,000 subscribers (they say at least) so I assume they are doing something right. Hard to find a better starting point by myself.
Just subscribed! Love the idea.
I have a question: what made you choose ActiveCampaign? Did you do any research or just decided to go with them?
Thanks!
Main reason is because it's what zeno chose for STM Forum some time ago.
I know some providers don't like affiliate related content, even if it's not affiliate marketing campaigns.
Aside from that, they have a good price and great automations interface.
I used MailChimp on adefy.com when I was gathering emails, and didn't really like their interface. Seemed out-dated.
Keep up the great work man.
Have you thought of pushing this through a Messenger Bot as well?
Originally Posted by geobak
It's something I will think more about during June, depending on how my other plans go. I am pretty sure an engaged email list is better than an engaged Messenger list because Facebook can change its mind all the time about what a company can do on their platform.
Based on numbers and feedback, the product is good so far.
The hurdle I have to pass now is getting good quality sponsors and maintain quality of a FREE newsletter. I think it's doable but I don't want to get ahead of myself - will see if this is true and then take on the next steps.
You know, like Mark said...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnQdr3HxmEI
Good stuff!
Just when I thought things were smooth, stuff happens.
ActiveCampaign is having issues so today's newsletter is delayed by over an hours - even though their issue was open for over 4 hours.
Kind of disappointed about it, had a perfect track record of sending the email out on time since deciding on an exact time.
Weekly update
OK, problem seems to have been finally solved. The email went out at least. Curious what happens in terms of engagement compared to usually.
Over the week, average open rate was just above 45% like previous week too - unlikely today's email will change much either way.
We went past 1700 subscribers, and while in Bucharest for the meetup happening here, a few people that were already subscribed had no idea I was part of this project. That's pretty cool, I'm glad people find the newsletter interesting and useful without knowing me before.
On the sponsorship side of things...
I've reached out to a few companies that I thought would be a good fit and so far the answers have been quite positive. You should start seeing sponsors more and more often in June's newsletter
It's a bit of extra work at the beginning to make sure what companies offer is useful and valuable to a big part of the audience, and it doesn't really feel like an annoying ad.
I've already turned down 3 offers from vendors who wanted me to put some things I was not at all comfortable with... I thought it would have ruined both the experience as a reader and the reputation the newsletter has been creating so far.
Since this is my first time in Bucharest, and I had a bit of a scare today with the technical issues from ActiveCampaign, I will head off into town and try to relax a bit over the weekend.
Cheers,
Manu.
Solid progress bro!
I signed up too, hope to get some good stuff
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
Originally Posted by cmdeal
One last update?
Alright, seems we've reached that point... The point where we wrap up the follow along.
I'll explain why at the end, first the regular updates.
We've reached the magical number of 2,000 readers while still maintaining a cool 45% average open rate
That's a pretty good performance in under 2 months of having this project launched publicly. We've also never missed an email, which I think is pretty cool. It's not to say there won't be any days off in the more distant future, but they will be planned and announced. Christmas and New Year's are the 2 that come to mind right now.
That also means that things are working out on the sponsorship side of things. There's still a small question left, whether or not readers get turned off much by seeing sponsors featured almost all the time but I'm rather optimistic because of how it will be presented - it won't be hidden or try to mislead in any way, plus it will keep the mix of entertaining and useful. The balance will depend a bit on what the sponsor's offer actually is.
The rest of the content won't decrease in quality either. On the contrary, the fact that we know this business model works gives us even more of an incentive to step up the quality.
So on that front, 2 more sponsors booked with 3 more very advanced talks. That's out of about 12 companies I've talked to.
OK, back to why this is probably the last update.
In short, the pet project is turning into a real business. And because of that, there will be other things that take priority, and some things should probably also stay private.
I plan on writing a post, or series, with everything I've learned doing this - perhaps including a step by step guide how I'd do it all over again (or how someone could apply it to other industries).
I've made many more mistakes than I've shared in this follow along. When looking at, I couldn't blame any reader for thinking things went only up but in practice, almost every week had its challenges and fires to put out.
Some bigger, and some smaller of course.
Cheers,
Manu.
PS: The community's favourite character is the Poolside Grinder (bottom row, second from the left).
Hi Manu - Great following along! Was already subscribed to your newsletter before reading this so inspiring me to possibly start my own newsletter for the cryptocurrency space (which is probably oversaturated but I work in the field so maybe i'll edge out an advantage :P).
Anyways wanted to ask if you have any recommendation for email marketing tools? Just want something that would be a good start to build out a minimum viable product e.g. integrates well with wordpress site, easy to customize my own email templates and not sure if I'm missing any other considerations? Thanks!
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
We use Campaign Monitor now but I think for a quick test, Active Campaign is good. Their drag-and-drop email creator is a bit better, more flexible in terms of design.
Once you do see that the MVP works, you should absolutely make a custom coded template for your ESP of choice. Visual editors add a lot of extra HTML in the email code that limit the content you can put in the email without passing Gmail's limit for clipping. The issue with clipped messages in Gmail is that they are way more likely to end up in the Promos or Spam tabs rather than the Inbox.
Let me know if you have more questions, happy to answer and help you out. Maybe others on STM get some useful info for their email ventures too.
Thanks Manu! Definitely making sure I stay compliant since I'm from the finance industry so can't even cover myself over the guise of ignorance 
But on the point of MVP would you recommend building out a proper newsletter for testing? Coding isn't difficult for me so I can probably put something together that looks nice and complies with Gmail restrictions. Alternatively have you work with China? They don't use Gmail so curious to see what impact this has. (I'm based in Asia hence the question)
Happy to take this offline or keep this on forum whatever works best. I intend to start a follow along (so everyone can comment) once I get the basics sorted.
Originally Posted by sushiparlour
But on the point of MVP would you recommend building out a proper newsletter for testing? Coding isn't difficult for me so I can probably put something together that looks nice and complies with Gmail restrictions. Alternatively have you work with China? They don't use Gmail so curious to see what impact this has. (I'm based in Asia hence the question)
Happy to take this offline or keep this on forum whatever works best. I intend to start a follow along (so everyone can comment) once I get the basics sorted.
It's definitely useful to get like 10-20 people reading your "real" newsletter over email for like 1-2 weeks before you launch it. We got some very important feedback that way.
We didn't focus on China, but we did get a couple of hundred readers there when someone with a Chinese audience shared it. Many people using QQ there and their open rates are not as high. In general, China seems more of a black box to me. When talking to people about perhaps distributing our content in China, they generally suggested not email but at the same time, everyone would suggest not email everywhere so it's hard for me to say without some first-hand experience.
The steps we did for our MVP were:
1. Google Doc just for content to see if we have enough for daily or if we need to reevaluate.
2. Emailing about 10-15 industry friends with the newsletter to get detailed feedback. This one had actual design and branding which changed in the first few days by quite a bit.
3. Launch to the public about 3 weeks of step 1 and 2 with as many influencers as we could.
Why is the Newsletter archive not being updated anymore?
I prefer reading it on the website once every couple of days i/o receiving an email every day as I try to keep my inbox as empty as possible.
Originally Posted by eurosen
Originally Posted by eurosen
Caching. Every newsletter gets posted every day, but Cloudflare doesn't instantly cache it and renew it. We'll look into it later, it's not a big priority though right now because people haven't asked about it, you're the first one to bring it up actually, haha.
If you want to check out the daily newsletters, you can find a direct link every day on our social media pages too (FB, Twitter and LinkedIn).
https://www.facebook.com/wtaffco/
https://twitter.com/wtaffco
https://www.linkedin.com/company/what-the-aff/
Gotta think of what the best way to go about the caching settings is so that website load times don't suffer. Our host is in Germany, so it works alright for most of Europe without caching but once you get to Asia and the Americas, it's pretty bad without a CDN that caches content at local endpoints.
Is caching for a service/site like this really a problem? I mean, it's not a sweeps lander on POP traffic To be honest, I never really cared about using a CDN with a "real" website that relied on organic traffic from the most part and it never posed a problem from what I could tell. People who are loading a site on purpose can wait a second or two... or did you run some tests and the results were different?
Originally Posted by matuloo
To be honest, I never really cared about using a CDN with a "real" website that relied on organic traffic from the most part and it never posed a problem from what I could tell. People who are loading a site on purpose can wait a second or two... or did you run some tests and the results were different?And also all page speed tests were pretty bad from non-Europe geos, saw pretty bad load times in Analytics too, etc.
Originally Posted by manu_adefy
But anyways, optimizing the loading speed can't hurt of course
Depends what you consider fast.
It would certainly take 2-3s more to load from a different content in most cases, if you don't use a service like Cloudflare or similar to solve DNS requests and load assets closer.
It's not so much about the size of the site but about making requests half way across the world and waiting for a response. The actual download is fast but each request has a long wait time.
Could be due to the fact that traffic from those three countries is more expensive?
Checked the website from multiple locations and the speed and it loads just fine.
If you do want to speed up things, try this plugin:
https://wp-rocket.me/
It has a great integration with Cloudflare, enables you to prefetch external sites (such as hotjar) and load your google analytics locally.
Combine it with https://imagify.io/ and you will have a very very fast website.
Been working with Wordpress for years and WP Rocket has been the best speed plugin out there.
Just my 2 cents.. Apart from that. I love the Newsletter! Just sent all the WTAFF newsletters I missed to my Kindle so got some nice reading material for my lunch break.
It should load fine now but it didn't before
And it was the CVR that was lower, the other stats were pretty much the same.
Also, keep in mind that FB specifically does give you worse traffic if your website loads slower, so traffic can be "more expensive" purely because of that too.
We'll test out more campaigns in the coming weeks.
I did load speed tests with several of the popular tools out there and it heavily improved since making the changes. Glad to hear it was the same good result from your side too, haha. We used to score about 7-8s for US regions, which was abysmal for a pretty small website in terms of KB size.
I hope your newsletter is doing well. May I know the estimated ROI so far for each subscriber?
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