DIA Half Year in Review 👀

Author

Stephen Mullan
January 08, 2024

👋 Welcome to the DIA Dispatch📫, your weekly round-up of Irish tech news from across the globe.

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As a loyal subscriber (TYSM) you will have noticed I launched Digital Irish Abroad (DIA) in July. Since then, I have been publishing a weekly newsletter and sharing content on LinkedIn regularly.

I took some time during the Christmas break to reflect on my progress and provide the highly anticipated and unconventional half-year review that nobody asked for. 😅

So join me in revisiting the original DIA mission, celebrating some successes, and failures so far as well as documenting the plans ahead for 2024.

Behind the scenes where the DIA magic happens 🔮

DIA was started for three main reasons🌍:

1️⃣ To highlight the achievements and incredible stories of Irish Founders and Executives in tech across the globe (haven’t even scratched the surface here).

2️⃣ To improve my writing and turn the inordinate amount of time reading about tech and start-ups into something productive.

3️⃣ The ability to grow an audience is an ever more important skill to have, and I wanted to see if I could do it (again, still a long way to go here).

Crunching the Numbers📊:

Since launching, I have posted 65 times on DIA’s LinkedIn and published 12 newsletters on beehiiv (analytics below):

  • LinkedIn content has had 84,850 impressions and 2,083 reactions, amassing 631 followers.

  • The most popular post had 339 likes, with the average post receiving 32 likes.

LinkedIn content engagement has been strong

  • The DIA Dispatch newsletter has 218 incredibly engaged subscribers, 100+ of whom have signed up in the last two months.

  • The posts have an average open rate of 60% and a Click Rate of 10.1%, with 1,587 overall impressions.

  • Interestingly the Open and Click rates have been growing with each post as I apply a more effective newsletter layout and optimised sending times across multiple timezones.

The key newsletter statistics since the launch

Triumphs in the DIA Journey🎊:

  • Developed a weekly ritual to efficiently collate the stories and write the newsletter and content. Every week that passes, I have become more efficient in doing this.

  • I have learned a huge amount about how to create and publish content on LinkedIn that the algorithm likes. A surprisingly more complex task than you'd think (TLDR LinkedIn hates URL links).

  • I'm very confident the newsletter has newsletter-market fit. Evidenced by the strong and consistent open rate (60%) and CTR (10.1%) over a decent length of time. For reference, Mailchimp publishers have an average of 22.71% and 2.91% respectively.

❝

The one marketing experiment conducted had excellent results, fueling my belief in newsletter-market fit. I cold messaged 100 Irish tech executives about the DIA Dispatch and asked them to subscribe if they were interested. I was hoping for 5 signups, but 19 ended up subscribing on the spot! Time to scale this experiment up. 💪

  • I have struggled to spend time updating DIA’s Twitter, Instagram, and website with the content posted on LinkedIn and Beehiiv - this is holding back organic growth. Thankfully, a new curator has just joined DIA, which is already solving this issue (more info soon!).

  • I promised myself I would do a review post like this every month documenting the DIA growth journey; it simply hasn’t happened.

  • Spent a significant amount of time building the background processes that facilitate publishing at a decent cadence and with high-quality content, but as mentioned above, no time has been spent on strategically marketing the content to relevant audiences.

Charting the Course for 2024 🚀:

  • Post 5 updates a week on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and the DIA website.

  • Grow the DIA editorial team. HMU if you are interested in getting involved!

  • Get to 2k newsletter subscribers by the end of 2024.

  • Go deep on the Founder Focus series (big plans for this!).

  • Run multiple marketing campaigns to get the content to a wider audience.

  • Experiment and create relevant video content

  • Document DIA growth progress as much as possible.

Now that I have laid out the goals for 2024, it's time to get to work – starting this week with some predictions on which DIA companies and people to watch out for in 2024. 👀

I have been super inspired by the number of people who have reached out to tell me how much they’ve enjoyed the content. If you have been following and have any ideas of how DIA could improve I would love to hear from you.

Looking forward, I’m excited for a big year of sharing some of the thousands of unique and compelling personal and start-up stories of the Digital Irish Abroad.

Stay Tuned! 📬

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