Why Newsletters?
- Independence: Email is one of the few places where you own your audience. Facebook controls Facebook. Twitter controls Twitter. Facebook controls Instagram. Google controls search. With email, you click a button and reach your people.
- Low cost: You can launch an email newsletter for free if you wanted to.
- Direct relationship with your audience resulting in a deeper connection.
- An audience is a cheat code. You can launch many new businesses to your audience.
- An opportunity to monetize something you love. Really love surfing? Make a newsletter that curates the best surf resorts around the world.
- No inventory, high margin. Ben Thompson’s Stratechery does 7 figures and maintains a 90% margin
- Riches in Niches. You’ve heard it a million times, but it’s true. Just ask Nerdy Nuts, a peanut butter company that launched this year and has already hit $1mm+ in revenue.
You’re viewing the free version.
The full version is loaded with even more value.
This is literally the best first newsletter resource around. And it’s 90% free (if you want to go deeper you can pay)
— Ryan Sneddon🍦 (@sneddymobbin) December 29, 2020
I paid $100 for a course before starting my newsletter and it didn’t provide 25% the value this does. https://t.co/RGbBEa41il
If I wanted to introduce someone to creating a newsletter, this would be the guide
— GJ Sequeira 🤠 (@gjsequeira) December 29, 2020
Kyle knows his stuff, especially when you see names like @blackhatwizardd @hypefury @MorningBrew @TheHustle and more mentioned
Highly recommend and amazing value for (almost) FREE! https://t.co/o69ZuMMtik
If the free guide is this good, imagine how good the paid guide is.
Examples
Other Examples
Build
Finding your Niche
Ask yourself:
What are you deeply interested in?
What niche do you want to become an expert at?
What specific knowledge do you have that others don’t?
What sets you apart?
What is your value proposition?
Do you have access to an interesting database?
Get ideas from popular subreddits.
Think of ideas where you can execute on these things:
The five newsletter jobs-to-be-done:
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) July 9, 2020
1. 😆 Entertain me (e.g. @TheBrowser)
3. 🤔 Make me smarter (e.g. @web)
3. ☝️ Keep me informed (e.g. @thedispatch)
4. 🤔 Make me money (e.g. @kevinmuir)
5. ✊ Help me feel like I'm part of something bigger (e.g. @emorwee)
Domain Name
- .com is the clear best
- .co is fine
- .io is fine, specifically for tech newsletters
- Avoid hyphens
- The shorter the better
Branding
ZeBrand takes you through a really cool process to help you craft your brand.
Keep your logo simple.
- Design it yourself with Canva or Illustrator.
- Find a freelancer on Fiverr.
Landing Pages
The page where your subscribers opt-in
Software
Carrd
- Best option to get started fast.
- Free version
- Cheap
- Super easy to use
- Visual editor
- Form Builder
- Some Integrations
WordPress
- Best option if you plan on adding content to drive traffic through SEO
- Free version
- Tons of Integrations & Plugins
- Elementor is an excellent page builder to pair with wordpress.
- WPCrafter can teach you how to set up your site.
Webflow
- Best option for more technical people
- Free until you're ready to launch
- Visual editor
- Form Builder
- Tons of Integrations via Zapier
- Templates can give you a head start on your page.
Convert Kit
- Best option if you use ConvertKit as your email service provider
- Free with ConvertKit
- Easy to use
- Visual editor
- Form Builder
Design & Examples
Choosing an Email Service Provider
Active Campaign
- Powerful Automations
- Easy to use visual editor
- Excellent Template features
- Landing Page Builder
- Form Builder
- Tons of Integrations
- Free Plan
- Landing page builder is hard to use
Convert Kit
- Free plan
- Powerful Automations
- Landing Page Builder
- Commerce | 0% transaction fees
- Easy to use visual editor
- Form Builder
- Tons of Integrations
- Limited template builder
Ghost
- Landing Page Builder
- Easy to use visual editor
- Form Builder
- Tons of Integrations
- Create a website for your newsletter
- Commerce | 0% transaction fees
- Free Plan
- Automations
Mail Chimp
- Automations
- Landing Page Builder
- Easy to use visual editor
- Form Builder
- Tons of Integrations
- Create a website for your newsletter
- Free Plan
- Paid Newsletter features
Substack
- Free plan
- Landing Page Builder
- Create a website for your newsletter
- Automations
- Commerce | 10% transaction fees
- Easy to use visual editor
- Segmentation
- Integrations
Curating Content
- Make a Twitter for your newsletter and only follow people in your niche. Get notifications for the most important.
- Find the important websites in your niche and sign up for their newsletters.
- Search Google news.
- Join related Facebook groups.
🌱 Be the first to get all future guides, ideas, and databases.
Pro Tip ➡️ Always send a test email to mail-tester before you send an email. It will do many checks to make sure your email is safe to send.
Grow
Every subscriber matters. 100 true fans can transform your life.
Referral Programs
You’re subscribers want to share your newsletter with their likeminded friends. Don’t make it difficult for them.
Learn how to set up a custom referral program for your newsletter with this Twitter thread by Ryan Sneddon.
My referral program accounts for 10% of my newsletter subscribers.
— Ryan Sneddon🍦 (@sneddymobbin) November 20, 2020
It's 99% automated (and the 1% is intentional)
This is a nitty gritty thread of how I built it
Examples
- How Morning Brew build their referral program
This is what their referral program looks like within their newsletter.
Tools & Software
- Sparkloop | These guys are INSANELY helpful to newsletter creators!
- ViralLoops
Why Twitter?
So I got serious about Twitter on April 12th 2020. Since then:
— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup) September 14, 2020
I’ve raised over $1MM and met with over 100 future investors in my real estate deals.
Made over $20k consulting folks on self storage.
Met several folks int in buying my biz.
& so much more.
What worked for me..
It is tough to explain the power of Twitter to someone who doesn't use it regularly.
— Austin Rief ☕️ (@austin_rief) November 14, 2020
Nowhere else can you make friends for life, learn from the smartest people in the world, and connect with people you look up to.
Long Twitter.
Twitter Threads
Create a very concise version of every newsletter and tweet it as a thread.
Hypefury is the best posting & scheduling software. Alternatively, you can use this free thread creator tool to create your threads.
Example
Michael Jordan played an essential role in Nike becoming a $160 billion global brand, taking home more than a billion himself.
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) November 13, 2020
The part you didn't know?
Without Tinker Hatfield, it would've never happened.
Time for a thread 👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/kPDtuo0v1c
Make sure the final tweet is a call to action for the reader to subscribe to your newsletter just like Joe does.
If you enjoyed this thread, you should:
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) November 13, 2020
1. Follow me, I tweet cool sports business stories everyday.
2. Subscribe to my free daily newsletter where I give detailed analysis on topics involving the money and business behind sports.https://t.co/VEj1NG9HZh
Learn More ➡️ Join Oliver Cantin’s free Twitter Growth, Influence, & Monetization course.
Sub Reddits
Use Redditlist to find popular subreddits in your niche.
Growth Tools
Create growth tools with Outgrow.
Growth tools are similar to lead magnets, but they are more interactive.
People are much more likely to give you their email address if you’re going to give them something in return like the results of the quiz they use took.
Examples
- A travel quiz for a travel newsletter.
- Which VR headset should you get?
- Find out your NFL pregame ritual
- What Hogwarts House you should be in?
- Which beard style suits you best?
- What kind of fitness plan do you need to follow?
- Are you overtraining or undertraining?
- What’s your brain type?
All of these templates are available to clone in Outgrow.
🌱 Be the first to get all future guides, ideas, and databases.
Monetization
Sponsors
Three key ways to get sponsors are cold email, marketplaces, and sponsors reaching out to you.
Cold Email
In the simplest form, it looks like this:
- Find leads with UpLead, IcyLeads, or simply searching for businesses in your niche.
- Find any email address with Anymail Finder.
- Send individually personalized emails with Mail Shake.
How do you find potential sponsors? Check out this step by step guide for finding sponsors.
Learn More ➡️ The best course to learn this process is Cold Email Mastery by Cold Email Wizard. This course is gold.
Advertise Page
Create a landing page for potential advertisers.
Link it to a Google Form or Typeform, then reach out to them to close the sale or have them checkout directly on your site. It can work either way.
Examples
Marketplaces
- Letterwell
- Paved
- Hecto
- SwapStack
- Sponsor Gap (Database of sponsors)
Tools & Software
- Letterhead
- Use Stripe for payments
Affiliate Sales
If you’re not familiar, it’s promoting someone else’s product and receiving a commission on each sale.
Making money as an affiliate is nice because it’s very easy to get started. All you have to do is plug in links.
However it’s typically not the best main revenue source when you’re starting out, because the commission rates tend to be low.
This means you need to make a ton of sales to make meaningful amounts of money.
You’ll have to use affiliates other than Amazon since they don’t allow you to use their affiliate links in emails. There are some high paying affiliates though.
Pro Tip ➡️ Only promote products that you truly use and enjoy. Don’t burn the trust your audience has in you.
Examples
Paid Newletters
Don’t want to deal with sponsors? Create a paid version of your newsletter.
Give your paid readers extra content like:
- 1 free newsletter, 3 paid newsletters.
- 1 free newsletter per month, 1-2 paid newsletters per week.
- Access to a private community. More on that later.
- Access to digital products. More on that later.
Examples
Digital Products
Think of a specific idea or strategy that you would love to learn more about.
Better yet, think of a couple and asks your audience which one they want to learn more about with this Free Newsletter Poll widget by Sparkloop.
Create a guide, course, or database that they would love to buy.
Examples
Tools & Software
Job Boards
Is your audience looking for a specific type of job?
Is your audience looking to hire a specific type of person?
Create a job board to facilitate these connections.
Examples
Tools & Software
Creating a job board is much easier than you think.
🌱 Be the first to get all future guides, ideas, and databases.
Exit
Your newsletter is a desirable, sellable asset.
Most cost-efficient web assets sell for 36x earnings.
— Chris ✈️ (@KintuLabs) November 24, 2020
To sell one for $100k, it needs to make $2,777 per month.
To break that down, that’s just 2 x $347 payments per week.
What site/newsletter can you build to sell 2 x $347 sponsorships per week?
Continuously remind yourself that every extra reoccurring dollar of income you create is worth $20 to $40 when you sell.
BUT that also means that every extra dollar you spend that doesn’t create more income is worth -$20 to -$40 when you sell.
Play around with our valuation calculator to see how many sponsors you need to get to sell at a price that makes you happy.
Marketplaces
Examples
- Morning brew was acquired at a $75 million valuation by Business Insider.
Learn
Follow & Learn
Courses & Organizational tools
- Profitable Newsletters by Chris Osborne *Chris also offers a newsletter set up service.
- NewsletterOS by Janel
- Newsletter Creator by Andrew Kamphey
Podcasts
Resources
You’ll find an insane amount of beautifully displayed resources at Letterstack,
but I’ve highlighted some key resources.
- The best tweets about newsletters curated by Janel
- Use Newsletter Spy to study the top substack newsletters.
- Morning Brew Newsletter Retention Case Study
- Engagement beats scale: Inside Morning Brew’s approach to subscriber growth
- Newsletter Crew
- 30 One Sentence Newsletter Tips
- This Is How I Decide What To Include In My Newsletter
Ideas & Strategies
Tips from newsletter creators
We asked newsletter creators, “If you could give a newsletter creator one tip, what would it be?”
Don’t Give Up
Connect with people whose audiences are similar to yours—and ideally bigger!
You’re viewing the free version.
The full version is loaded with even more value.
This is literally the best first newsletter resource around. And it’s 90% free (if you want to go deeper you can pay)
— Ryan Sneddon🍦 (@sneddymobbin) December 29, 2020
I paid $100 for a course before starting my newsletter and it didn’t provide 25% the value this does. https://t.co/RGbBEa41il
If I wanted to introduce someone to creating a newsletter, this would be the guide
— GJ Sequeira 🤠 (@gjsequeira) December 29, 2020
Kyle knows his stuff, especially when you see names like @blackhatwizardd @hypefury @MorningBrew @TheHustle and more mentioned
Highly recommend and amazing value for (almost) FREE! https://t.co/o69ZuMMtik
If the free guide is this good, imagine how good the paid guide is.
What did we leave out? How could we improve it?
