Module 4 — Lesson 20

What Are Recommendations?

Recommendations are a way to organically grow your newsletter through the beehiiv network. Essentially, when people sign up for your newsletter you can recommend another relevant newsletter. If you trade recommendations, you’ll have a network of newsletters all recommending you.

It’s like passive income… except instead of cash you gain subscribers (which potentially leads to cash down the road).

Why Are Recommendations Awesome?

Recommendations can drive 100s of newsletter subscribers without you doing basically anything. Simply trade recommendations with another newsletter publication and watch the subscribers roll in.

Here’s an example of Brian O’Connor and Jasper Polak cross-promoting each other.

Brian promoting Jasper:

Jasper promoting Brian:

That’s some bee-autiful teamwork! 🐝

Wait, wait, wait… before you move, I have one more bee pun for you:

So how do you set it up?

How to Add a Recommendation

1. Click on Grow

2. Click on Recommendations

3. Click on Add recommendation

Click this button to start adding a new recommendation to another publication

4. Search for the name of the publication

A pop-up modal will appear and here you'll search for the publication you want to recommend in your newsletter

5. Reason for recommending

Briefly share why you're recommending them once you've located the name of the publication

6. Click on Add recommendation

Click the Add recommendation button to save your selection

To add a New Recommendation in a Post

You’re also able to add a new Recommendation while creating a new post (like how Brian and Jasper did it).

Create a new post:

1. Click on +

Clicking on the + will open your list of available styles and blocks to choose from

2. Click on Recommendation

Choose the Recommendation block

3. Click on Add a recommendation

Once the Recommendation block appears in your post, you can click the Add a recommendation option to be taken back to the creation process above in a separate tab

4. Search for your new Recommendation

Once you've added your new Recommendation, you can search for it in your original tab and it will be available

How to Update Your Recommendations

The Recommendations page

Now that you've added a Recommendation to your publication, it will appear in your list of Recommendations where you can make changes

The Action Menu

For each recommended publication, you have an action menu to make changes.

Edit reason

You can edit the reason why you recommend this publication to potential subscribers

Make inactive

You can make a recommended publication inactive as well as reactivate it when you're ready to make it available to potential subscribers again

Remove

You can remove this publication from your list of recommendations permanently

Arrange Your Recommendations

You’re also able to arrange the order of appearance of your Recommendations to potential subscribers

Click on Arrange

Clicking the Arrange button will open a side panel pop to arrange the order

Click and drag your Recommendations

From here you can click and drag your list of Recommendations in your preferred order of appearance

Tracking Performance

While in your recommendations dashboard, you'll also be able to see all publications that are actively (and have previously) recommended your publication at any time, along with how many subscribers they sent your way.

We also have a special attribution for subscribers who signed up for your publication via recommendations. The acquisition source will show:

recommendation: website_of_referrer / referralrecommendation: blog.beehiiv.com / referral

This also makes it simple to track the performance and quality of these subscribers relative to your other acquisition sources, using our 3D Analytics feature and reports.

A video tutorial to set up your Recommendations:

Additional Resources:

• Why does my publication not appear in “recommendations”?

• How can I have another publication recommend me?

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