To grow The Steal Club, I look at what other more popular newsletters do so I can steal it (like a good thief).

For that, I use a tool called SimilarWeb (not sponsored or affiliate).

What I do:

Type in the URL from a newsletter I consider a reference in my niche, like Growth in Reverse.

From there, I can see:

• How much traffic they are getting x month

• Where’s that traffic coming from

• What keywords they rank for

From this graphic, I understand that most of the Growth in Reverse traffic comes from organic search, referrals, social, and email.

(I overlook “Direct” because that’s always the #1 channel for newsletters)

I didn’t think they would have so much traffic from organic search, so let’s take a deeper look at the keywords they rank for:

Interesting.

The keywords they rank for are creator names!

And it makes sense, as the newsletter is all about deep dives on these creators.

Which then gets published and ranked on Google for the name of that creator — and benefits from that traffic.

That’s a genius move!

So this is my thinking process:

Since I write a newsletter in a similar industry, I could start writing public articles about some of these creators, too, so I can benefit from a bit of this traffic.

Basically “steal” Growth in Revers’s playbook.

I figured this out sometime last year. Fast forward to today:

I wrote one article about Paddy Galloway (a popular YouTube consultant) and these were the results:

• The Steal Club ranks on Google for “Paddy Galloway” searches

• We got 200 visitors from Google (so far) thanks to it

Just like Chenell is doing with Growth in Reverse. That’s what I call a tactic stolen successfully

Tactic stolen first from Newsletter Operator. Shoutout to Growth in Reverse, one of my favorite newsletters.

🕵️‍♂️ How to Steal it?

Use SimilarWeb to spy on your newsletter competitors.

Try to reverse engineer what they are doing and steal it for yourself, just like I did with Chenell and Growth in Reverse.