If you’re in UBERZOOMER you definitely wonder about which entrepreneurial efforts could lead you into earning A LOT in the shortest amount of time possible. And you’d probably be inclined to believe the sounder options would be something along the lines of “starting a YouTube channel in the right niche” or a “cracking the code of TikTok to promote my website there”.

And you would not be wrong.

But the approach I am going to talk about here in this post is something usually considered deprecated. And often times just forgotten about.

And yet, it still works in the year of 2023.

• It made this guy $320,000 a month
• It made this guy a million dollars in his first six months and he only started last year in 2022.
• And it also made this 25 year old $75 million in just five years.

That’s a ridiculous amount of money.

And not only will it make you lots of money but it’s arguably the safest business to have in any market condition. And I call this email blogging or old-fashioned newsletters.

What’s a Newsletter?

All right so what’s a newsletter? I think everyone already knows this but essentially it is an audience list that you build with the purpose of reaching them out with your content. And hopefully making a profit out of their vested interest in what you have to say.

The time I send an email I make around $5,000 which is more than I was making in a whole month of working full-time as a doctor.

And what do you think when you hear the word newsletter? Boring? Not sophisticated? Unsexy?

Well today I’m gonna prove you wrong and blow your socks off. So in this post I’m gonna tell you why there is a point to this business model, why it is not out of fashion, and how there are lots of ways you could potentially make money from it. And eventually run a newsletter in the same way as you’d run business.

And I’ll show you how you can start, even if you have zero audience right.

More towards the end of the post I’ll share a few hacks as well, as you can start making money sooner than you think. I’ll also go over the reasons whether this activity is really for you, as there are a few catches to this.

Benefits of Newsletters

As everyone knows, the current trend is social media. Down to obsessive levels, almost. A lot of our modern cultural life now happens there, and some Social Media websites have acquired near-institutional power to their names.

However, from a business standpoint, Social Media may not be the best conduit available for many niches and use-cases.

The internet far precedes Social Media, and there is a wide variety of website types which people have continue to use as a reference point.

And things get a bit more complicated when you consider that conversion rates are in fact better in some of those websites and services when the context is right.

High Conversion Rates

And to cut to the chase, if you’re looking for the best possible conversion rates, the truth is that you will find those in email newsletters.

There was a study by McKinsey that found that newsletters acquired 40 times more customers than social media. Newsletters generated 174% more conversions than Facebook or Instagram. And the average open rate for an email newsletter is 25% where the average reach for a Facebook post is just around 6%.

So let’s say you have 10,000 email subscribers and 10,000 Facebook commands. Your email would have reached 2,500 people while your Facebook post would have been seen by just 600 people if you’re lucky. So you see when done right, email will give you a much better ROI.

And why is this the case?

And we all trust our inbox. One could say that the people that gave their email addresses REALLY trust the person or business they gave their information to.

And notice all the big guys, all the gurus out there – some of which you will probably already follow: Everybody has an email list.

Free to Start

Alright, so a couple of things I love about a newsletter. Number one is free to start. Whereas if you start a YouTube channel, you may need a camera, lighting, hard drive, but newsletter, $0. And you’re not going to lose money doing a newsletter.

Low Friction

A TikTok or a YouTube channel is hard to start. Some people are shy in front of the camera. You have to write the script, shoot the video and edit it afterwards. It’s a lot of work. It’s a big commitment.

But not a newsletter: You can start it right now, with whatever device you’re using to read this post. If you have a phone, you can type on it, and write some very decent entry-level texts you can post.

When it comes to starting out, you’re only limited by your inspiration. And even if inspiration somehow doesn’t get to you, you can always find some inspiration elsewhere – looking at what the competition is doing and writing about – and come back with a brain full of ideas and ready to craft your very first article.

You Own the Audience

If you’re building an audience on YouTube, you’re going to be on the same page. TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, you’re essentially building a house on rented land. So it doesn’t matter if you have 1 million or 10 million subscribers, you don’t own the audience.

What’s relevant today might not be relevant tomorrow.

Look at MySpace, Snapchat, and who knows what will happen to TikTok one day. And you know what? Every year, everybody’s saying email is dead.

But you know what else happens every year? All these social media channels that we all love and dedicate our time in, they’re putting up walls between us creators and our audience. And you even have to pay (ads) to reach your own audience.

But then again, since you’re playing on people’s platforms, they can make up any rules that they want.

But with your own newsletter, you own everything. So you want to build your influence without being vulnerable to algorithm changes that can happen anytime.

It’s kind of like insurance in case something happens to social media.

And Tobias, the CEO of Sharpie Fire Set, the email is the last thing we have total control over. Because email is our own platform. And number four is that a newsletter is an asset that you can monetize a million different ways.

So, How to Make Money with Newsletters?

And this is the juicy part. So how do you actually make money from newsletters? Of course, cannot just write stuff and hope for money to start magically showing up in your bank account. You will need to go through a few hoops to get the money to show, and it is all much more simple than it may sound like at first.

Brand Sponsorships

Number one, brand sponsorships. So once you get a good amount of subscribers, you can start reaching out to brands for sponsorship deals. And here’s the fact, a buddy of mine runs a newsletter talking about dogs and he’s got about 50,000 subscribers.

He charges between $3,000 and $5,000 per email for brand sponsors.

So if he sends a newsletter every week, that’s four times a month. It means that you can make between $12,000 to $20,000 in brands sponsor shifts alone. And what’s great is that once you get the ball rolling, a lot of these brands will work with you on a recurring basis, which means that you can get paid every week or every month.

It’s predictable and I like that. And another way to make money is through affiliate marketing. So if you have a newsletter about dogs, you can plug in affiliate links in your newsletter and earn a commission when someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase.

And you don’t want to underestimate this guys. So if you’re in a gardening niche, for example, and someone buys a high ticket item like a lawn mower, those commissions can add up pretty quickly.

Ad Networks

And another way you can monetize is by running an ad network on your newsletter. So if you go to any cooking blog, you’ll probably see that these websites are covered with ads. Well, did you know that you can run the same type of ads as well on your newsletters?

So an app like Beehive has started to integrate this on the system. So if you use them to send your newsletters, you have access to these tools as well.

Premium Newsletter

And the next way is to have a premium newsletter where you charge a monthly fee for someone to be a subscriber. So you would probably start with a free one and later you can start a separate premium newsletter. And this is actually pretty common in the investment niche where people would pay maybe around 15 to $20 a month to join a newsletter where a creator shares his own investment portfolio and his top picks and and even allow his audience to have private access and ask questions. And you can basically do this in any niche. If you find that you can give extra value to your audience, you can definitely charge for it and people will pay. So think about that for a second.

If you just have a thousand people subscribe to your $10 a month newsletter, that’s $10,000 a month. And you know how I feel about things that are recurring, right? All right, if you’re liking this content so far, please click like and subscribe down below.

What to Write About

All right, so the next step is to find something to write about. So people always say, I don’t know what to write about.

Requirements

Well, you can actually write about whatever you want, but you gotta choose something you care about. HOWEVER, this is not enough to turn a newsletter into a profitable business venture. You cannot expect to just write a bunch of generic filler lines about how nice the weather is this week, and expect people to be lining up to give you their email addresses. Also, not all niches are the same, and there are some topics which people really are eager to know more about, which will lead them into giving you their contact more readily.

In short, in order for a Newsletter Business to work, you need:

• To really – and I mean REALLY – love the niche and topics you’re getting yourself into. You will need to have a bare minimum of consistency with your writings
• Expertise. Yeah, you’re not getting your way through this if you don’t have above average knowledge about whatever topic you’re planning to write about.
• Social Proof (or some other proof) of Expertise. Some sort of indicator you’ve been at the things you claim to have been at for some period of time.
• Information which is in demand. Your writings should provide your audience with opinions and insights which aren’t at the reach of a simple 5-second Google search. Unique takes, insider information, compilation of hard-to-gather news, profound insights – these are all things that will help you get started.
• First-Hand Experience. If you’re not an insider of an industry or field, you can always give your much-sought-after personal experiences to an interested audience. For example, if you’re a mom, you can write about your experiences, tips and tricks about on how to raise a child.

“But I don’t have in-depth knowledge about anything….”

But if you really have no idea what to write about, you can even curate from other quality sources and create a newsletter.

For example this one guy, Sean Puri, gathers crypto news from other sources and simply put them into his newsletter and he called it Milk Road.
Milkroad doesn’t do market predictions, there are no deep dives. It’s just a curation of crypto news and he delivered it in a full-on. very fun and casual way.

Just like a conversation you’ll have with a friend over a beer. And he grew his audience from zero to 250,000 in just one year, and he later sold the newsletter for a million dollars.

And this was even after the crypto crash. So my point is you don’t have to be an expert, you just have to be a curious human and be consistent with it.

Tool to deliver the Newsletters

All right, now once you’ve decided on a topic you wanna write about, you wanna use a tool that can deliver the newsletters.

You don’t wanna be writing every week 52 times a year.

So if you’re just getting started, I would recommend using Beehiiv. I use it personally and it’s so easy to use and it’s completely free.

And it’s also used by the Milk Road, so the big guys are using it. And it also allows you to sell premium subscriptions.

You can put ads on your newsletters and everything I just said earlier you can do with Beehive.

And again, it’s completely free to start if you click on the link below. And you can upgrade once you get some traction, you can get the premium plan, which gives you a custom domain and you can use it without the Beehive branding. So I’m not sure how long the free account’s gonna be available for. So just to be safe, just sign up first and think later. It’s free anyway.

Growing an Audience

Now I know what you’re thinking. I don’t have any audience, how do I start? Well, everyone has social media, right? So even if you don’t have a lot of followers, use your own social media as a starting point.

Everyone has a start somewhere.

Once you do that, another great way is by going to Facebook groups. So if you’re in the parenting niche, you can search for parenting in Facebook and you can check if there’s any audience for the topic that you want to write about.

So once you find these groups, you can join them, you can provide some value and eventually get the audience to your newsletter.

Remember to bring value first and people will naturally follow you.

Collabs

Now once you’ve grown to about 500 subscribers, then you can do something more sophisticated called Collabs.

So this is one of the hacks I use as well to bring massive results. So you can browse websites like Substack and find other newsletters with similar size as you and basically ask them to do a subscribers swap.

So you can simply write an email saying something as simple as:

Hey, I have a newsletter with 500 subscribers and I’m wondering if you’d like to cross-promote and grow our list together.

Here’s what I have in mind to put on yours and you can tell me what you want to put on my newsletter. You make it stupid simple. And since it’s the win-win for both parties, I can guarantee you that nine out of ten, they’ll say yes. There’s no money involved, there’s no friction. So do this over and over again until you make millions of dollars. All right, so I’m going to give you a bonus tip to get more sign-ups faster. So the trick is you got to give people a reason to subscribe.

Irresistible Freemium

Nobody wakes up in the morning and say, oh my god, I can’t wait to subscribe to your email list. Or ooh, email. I want more email. People generally don’t want more emails. You need to let people know why they should subscribe. So you’re going to have what I call an irresistible freemium.

Or as some people call it: Ethical bribes. You’ve got to have an offer that’s so good that people want to join your newsletter and your offer has to contain three things.

1. Number one, it needs to solve a problem.
2. Number two, has to be high value.
3. And number three, it has to have one quick win.

So something that would help them achieve something quickly. For example, if you’re in the travel niche, you can probably say something like, how I flew to Japan in business class for $53.

Or if you’re in the parenting niche, you share a quick hack on how to stop your baby from crying in five seconds. Like who wouldn’t want that? Make your offer so good, people will feel stupid for saying no. All right, I’ll make it super easy for you guys. If you want a guide that gives you examples of the best ethical bribes, you can download it for free down below. You see what I did there?

In the future I may make another post about how to reach out to brands for sponsorship deals and how to run the business on autopilot. After all, we’re in a war for attention: Once you can get someone’s attention and build a strong community for them, there are millions of ways you can make money.