Amy Bushatz does not have time to market.
As the founder, editor and primary reporter for The Mat-Su Sentinel, Amy is in charge of everything from the site design to financing the project to reporting the majority of the news. She’s busy chasing down body cam footage, following the school board and keeping her community updated on environmental disasters.
But Amy also knows that if she wants to grow and fund The Mat-Su Sentinel so it can serve the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska for years to come, she has to do a little marketing. Her previous experience as the Executive Editor at Military.com taught her how to turn casual traffic into loyal readers. She knew there were lots of tools available to reduce the labor of marketing, but which ones made sense for a local news startup?
The Mat-Su Sentinel launched in 2024 on Ghost, which left Amy with few built-in marketing tools. Ghost has robust publishing and newsletter tools—the publishing side is beloved by journalists worldwide—but it doesn’t handle things like welcome flows, pop-ups or upsells. To fill this gap at first, Amy resorted to a lot of manual marketing work, individually placing calls to action in every story and communicating with readers one by one. That is, until she found Outpost.
Automatically asking for money
The first thing Amy automated was her membership and donation appeals.
Before Outpost, Amy had set up a welcome flow with automation tool Zapier, but it kept breaking. If someone unsubscribed during the welcome flow, it would halt the Zap (what Zapier calls an automation) and stop the welcome flow from sending to everyone.
“I cannot spend all of my time fixing a Zap. I was literally fixing Zaps off of a ski trail. I started using Outpost because I needed a welcome flow solution,” Amy said. She noted that Ghost recently added welcome emails, but that it wasn’t sufficient yet since it’s only one email.
The welcome flow for The Mat-Su Sentinel is five emails long, sending immediately on subscribe and running through the first six months of a newsletter subscriber’s journey. These emails introduce Amy and the work of The Sentinel. They also make a strong pitch for the membership and one time donations.
Some readers find these automated emails to be so effective, they believe she’s personally emailing them. “If I have written an email that leaves you under the impression that I took the time to write this to you—just you—job well done,” Amy said.
Her welcome emails get good clickthrough rates too—3-8% per email with some of those readers becoming members or giving a one time donation. Amy estimates about 15% of their new paid members are coming from the welcome flow. All of those conversions are happening automatically without any additional effort from The Sentinel team.
Programmatically growing the newsletter
Newsletters remain the most valuable marketing asset a publisher can develop. The easiest way to grow your list is to funnel the thousands of site visitors who discover your site to a newsletter signup as they’re reading a story.
“Outpost is a big deal for me because I was manually putting in all of these CTAs into my stories,” Amy said. “Being able to have that be programmatic—that alone—is a major win.”
You can add newsletter sign up blocks inside Ghost, but the options are limited and it all happens manually. You have to create a block, save it as a snippet and load it into every story you publish. If you want to update the language later, you have to go back and replace every single one by hand.
Once she switched to Outpost, Amy worked with audience growth pro Phillip Smith through the Tiny News Collective to finetune the placement and messaging of the call to actions. Right now, The Sentinel is using one dynamic CTA block towards the top of every story and a pop-up newsletter subscribe form if you spend a few seconds reading the story. They also experimented with homepage pop-ups but decided against them for now because the story CTAs are converting well.
How much is this actually working? Amy shared some recent data. For the week of February 8th, The Mat-Su Sentinel gained 27 new free subscribers, 13 of which signed up through Outpost calls to action. The day before we spoke, Amy had a viral story about a superintendent using AI to cite wildly inaccurate data about a whole different school district. 8 new free subscribers joined the email list that day and 6 came from the Outpost newsletter signup form.
Amy doesn’t just use these blocks to promote the newsletter. Outpost CTAs are intelligent and they can detect the difference between an anonymous visitor and a newsletter subscriber. If you’re already on The Sentinel’s newsletter, you’ll see an upsell to become a paying member.
Visitors won’t dig around for your newsletter or membership info without being prompted. For local publishers like Amy who have stories that get shared widely to people who’ve never heard of the site, these simple action blocks mean many more visitors a week are becoming subscribers and paying members than before.
Retaining as much recurring revenue as possible
Automating revenue for local news publishers isn’t just about growing the email list and adding paying members, it’s also about keeping members with you long term.
“The money is at the failed payment,” Amy said, referring to Outpost’s Failed Payment Flow which sends several reminders to your members that their credit card needs to be updated.
Failed payments are an especially huge problem with monthly contributors because they are being charged 12 times a year. Outpost’s Failed Payment Flow reduces how many of these members get automatically canceled and forgotten about and instead, recoups those dollars and reengages those members. Amy shared that it’s been so effective that only a couple people ever have left for good.
As The Mat-Su Sentinel matures, Amy’s utilizing more of the retention options inside Outpost beyond failed payments. She recently enabled communications about cancellations and renewals for annual members who have forgotten they’re about to get rebilled. Every automation she adds reduces the amount of time she has to market her membership or answer customer service requests from confused members.
These are all options inside Outpost’s Autoresponder with templates ready for you to turn on.
What you should copy from The Mat-Su Sentinel
If you are still doing most of your marketing manually, you’ll want to embrace Amy’s automation mindset.
Adding programmatic calls to action throughout your site and utilizing automated emails are the basics all publishers need in place. Anything that can be automated should be.
The Mat-Su Sentinel’s call to action strategy has been super effective for their list growth so that’s a great place to begin. Add an ask to join your newsletter inside your stories. Amy has hers three paragraphs down which is a good sweetspot. It’s a good idea to have one at the end of your story too, especially for longer stories. With Outpost, you can set a minimum length so if a story is only five paragraphs, you won’t have back to back CTAs.
You’ll set these CTAs to be a newsletter signup for anonymous site visitors, but for free readers, you can make them “become a member” or “donate.” Outpost will detect a visitor’s status and show the correct action to take.
While you’re in there, I’d also add a pop-up like Amy has on her site. Outpost’s co-founder Ryan Singel has said these work great for newsletter list building, and on my site, the pop-up converts better than the in-story blocks do. You can enable this on your homepage or inside a story and you have total control over how long it takes to show up or how far down the page someone has to scroll to see it.
Outpost has allowed Amy to spend less time marketing her project and more time reporting stories that matter to Mat-Su residents. Automation isn’t a nice to have. It’s a must have for independent publishers who want to keep their site growing while they deliver high quality news. You don’t have to manually send every marketing email and you don’t have to patch a bunch of tools together. Outpost has created the automated system you need to grow your list and convert more paid subscribers. It’s ready when you are.
Start your free trial with Outpost to try the Automatic CTAs and the Best Damn Autoresponder for Ghost. Plus, join us at upcoming events to learn how you can grow your member-backed publication this year.
