Local Newsletter Life: Guest POV

Today's newsletter looks a little different. 

My name is Victoria, and I'm taking over Skipblast today to tell you all about how traumatizing local newsletter life is.

To introduce myself briefly, I'm a marketer with a background in travel blogging, which, unfortunately, we are all realizing is more or less dead in 2025. 

At least when it comes to SEO as a main traffic source.

Luckily, I pivoted to an agency model around two years ago and now manage a digital marketing agency in Bali, Indonesia, with my two partners.

I've been running a local, Bali-based newsletter for around 1.5 years now, and while the road here has been rocky, we're finally starting to see some success.

We have around 13k subscribers, an average opening rate of 50%, and a distinct lack of sponsors for the newsletter. While we manage to sell ad placements to our agency clients from time to time, it's definitely difficult to get local businesses to advertise with us. 

Our newsletter is set up in a way that we primarily drive traffic to our Bali-based news website, as well as an Indonesia-focused travel blog and their respective affiliate links.

We also promote a local partner who provides expat job opportunities (which are highly coveted here in Bali) and a network that hosts digital nomad meetups, social events, and networking opportunities.

Finally, we curate selected happy hours, meal deals, discounts, and events in local restaurants.

All of this together actually provides quite a bit of value to the reader, and through many months of trial and error, we managed to figure out which sections readers appreciate and which ones they skip.

For example, we used to have a list of upcoming nightlife events, club nights, and parties in Bali, and those were not only incredibly hard to gather but also absolutely no one cared or clicked on them. Lesson learned.

Here's the thing: the results of studying what the reader wants actually made our site and approach worse, and here's how:

Since the main website we are sending traffic to is a news site, we ended up relying on shock value more and more over the past year.

Bali sometimes feels like the Wild West, with a lot of drug busts, secret prostitution networks, deportations of foreigners, drowning tourists, and tragic traffic accidents. Foreigners do not have the best reputation here, and with corruption being widespread, the news stories coming out of Bali are always scandalous.

And with shock value being the norm, we are realising that our readers unfortunately have zero interest in clicking on anything that doesn't involve death, prostitutes, or drugs.

And just like that, we went from a reputable news source to a clickbaity gossip paper that loves to blow stories out of proportion to get views.

Our recent feedback is reflecting that, and I'm afraid it's also impacting our ability to get sponsors. Because, who wants to advertise their beach club in the same newsletter that will likely drag its reputation through the mud the next time there is a click-worthy incident in the area?

The thing is, it's not like we don't publish positive, feel-good stories; the problem is that absolutely no one wants to read those. 

We see a huge decrease in clicks when our headlining stories aren't scandalous, which leaves me with the difficult decision most big businesses face at some point: Do we want to be successful or do good?

My strategy right now is to try and do a bit of both, as impossible as that might feel. I'm being more picky with the "positive" stories we cover, focusing on topics that might still be interesting to people and driving those clicks. 

Headings are also a big topic for us, and it comes as no surprise that a good headline changes click-through rates completely. We used to default to clickbait, which works wonders but ends up leaving readers frustrated, so I'm trying to steer clear of that.

In general, I'm optimistic when it comes to our newsletter and its corresponding website. We don't have a lot of competition for English-language news sources in Bali, and we're managing to run the platform without needing a lot of resources. 

Would a few more sponsors be nice?

Sure. 

But, I have also yet to do cold emailing to local businesses, which might help put us on the radar. I usually try to avoid this strategy at all costs, but I can't expect to just sit here and wait for the newsletter to market itself. 

Local newsletter life is definitely not easy, and for me personally, reading about how others are doing it keeps me motivated. 

Hopefully, your local newsletter is doing even better than mine, and if you're still thinking about starting one, consider very, very carefully if you want to go down this road.

It's not pretty, but somehow we're still here.

All the best from Bali,

Victoria

Coming up…

Tomorrow’s guest takeover is Doug Cunnington!

Quick message from Doug - Tuesday, Feb 25, I’m doing my weekly livestream with Heather Farris and Brooks Conkle. Join live at Noon MT, or watch the reply later. It’s unrelated to flipping, but we’ll talk about what’s working right now in side hustles and digital marketing. Set a reminder on YouTube https://youtube.com/live/-h2iuOdTlLU?feature=share

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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