How I use SEO to grow my newsletter

+ a prompt to help you do the same.

I don’t know a thing about SEO.

That’s the honest truth. I’m much more of a writer than I am a marketer.

And yet, in the two years I’ve been running the Freelance Writing Network, I’ve gained hundreds of free subscribers and dozens of paid subscribers from Google alone.

I didn’t take any of it seriously until recently.

But the fact is, I still don’t know much about it.

So what do I do? I cheat. Obviously.

See, this is where I find AI useful. It’s not a writer or a creative substitute, but it is a tool that functions not unlike a virtual assistant.

I could spend weeks taking courses, learning about SEO, working out how to rank on LLMs. But the honest truth is that I simply don’t want to. I’m busy, have a lot on my plate already, and would love to save myself the hassle.

So instead, I use an AI model to generate a prompt for me.

Now, I’m using Perplexity because I find it far more reliable than other models (and I’d always suggest staying away from ChatGPT). The model knows about my work already because I’ve explained in great detail who my audience is, so it’s able to fine-tune exactly who is going to be finding me via Google.

To maximise the effectiveness, I would suggest telling the model about your work and your ideal reader. Give it as much detail as possible so the SEO details are as focused as possible. Different niches have very different keywords, so this matters.

Results on my experiences of doing this coming soon (though one post got me 608 clicks and 25,000 impressions in just four weeks).

The exact prompt I use for Perplexity is below. Give it a try and see if it helps.