Can a 'best of' contest grow a local newsletter list?
Short answer
Yes, once your brand is established. Make people subscribe to vote, and every nominated barber shop and restaurant pushes its own customers to your site so they can vote for it. The businesses do the promotion and you collect the emails. Run it before people trust your brand and it falls flat.
The best-of-town vote is one of the oldest plays in local media. Community newspapers ran them for decades. I think the local newsletter is now the local media company, so it should own this, with one change: you have to subscribe to vote.
How does a best-of contest bring in subscribers?
Voting requires an email address. The businesses that get nominated want to win, so they go on their own social accounts and ask their customers to vote for them. Those customers land on your site, and they can't vote until they subscribe.
"So the barbershop and the restaurants are now pushing people to your website to vote, but they can't vote until they subscribe. So now you're getting subscribers to vote for them as best of their town."
That's basically free subscribers. I've talked to people who have done this, and they get a lot of subscribers from it. The businesses can also pay you to be part of it. I've also seen an events platform with this built in: the business posts "vote for us" and the voter has to enter an email to cast a vote.
Why did the old newspaper versions fade?
Mostly marketing. Everything is a marketing problem now. A lot of legacy companies run these the way that made sense in 2007 and never changed. A newsletter with an engaged list and social channels can run the same contest and get far more out of it.
When is a brand ready to run one?
Only when people see the brand as at least somewhat legit. You can't launch one out of the blue. I can't just announce "TJ's best of Leander." People need to be able to look you up, see that you're real and see the proof.
When we'd been running our Leander newsletter for almost seven months, I thought we probably could do it. I still planned to wait about six more months and make it a vote for 2026.
What shortcuts should you avoid?
Quick-money shortcuts. Think of your newsletter as a brand that becomes synonymous with your area and everything good about it, a 20, 50 or 100-year brand. Quick-money shortcuts damage the name you're trying to build.
A social media agency owner I talked to planned to run a legitimate best-of in his region on purpose, as a contrast to a competitor's pay-to-win version. Voters in his plan would also have to give an email to vote.
Is there a version without a contest?
Yes, and I love it. Ken Jee, who runs Austin Founders Feed, told me on my podcast that he reached out to 20 big local connectors, asked each of them to recommend others, and ended up with a list of about 60 people. He posted one per day on social. He said it flipped his subscriber growth from mostly paid to mostly organic in about a month. He's at about 6,500 subscribers.
The difference is why people share. In a best-of, businesses share because they have to in order to win. With a list of local people, they share because they want to, since you're featuring them as people. And these are people who already have audiences, so the sharing reaches real followers. I don't know yet how a regular consumer local newsletter copies it exactly, but every local operator should think about how to adapt the idea.
For other low-cost growth ideas, see how to grow a local newsletter without ads and how to run a newsletter giveaway.
Answered by TJ Larkin. From client calls, Local Media HQ podcast conversations and my own notes, 2024-2026. Last updated .