Newsletter Notes
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Earlier this year, I started two newsletters: one about learning Argentinian Spanish and another about helping non-native English speakers land remote dev jobs. Because of the heavy focus on Newsletters as a medium, I gathered a lot of notes. Fair warning though…one newsletter has 80+ subs and the other has 1000+ so take my notes with a grain of salt.
But they’ve been living in my Notion…which means they’re not available to anyone but me. I decided, “Why let these sit here and rot? Let’s publish on my blog, clear up Notion and maybe it’ll help someone else.”
Plus, I’m selfishly hoping it starts a conversation with someone new and leads to a new friendship. That’s the whole point of putting your thoughts on the internet anyway.
So let’s dive in.
Newsletters about Newsletters
Anyone talking about newsletters or how to grow them, I instantly subscribed to. That lead to a lot of inbox fatigue. But, these all still have valuable tips, many around newsletter growth and monetization.
Here’s the short list along with a short description of each:
- The Saturday Solopreneur by Justin Welsh with tips, strategies, and resources to launch, grow, and monetize your internet business.”
- The Newsletter Nerd by Jay Yang with practical tips for growing your newsletter
- Growth in Reverse One of my favorites! “Each week, I reverse engineer how a top creator grew from 0 to 50k+ subscribers.”
- Newsletter Operator where you learn “How to grow and monetize your newsletter. Learn the exact tactics top newsletters are using”
How to Make $1M with a Newsletter Business
Again, planning to go all in on newsletters and make a bet I could figure out how to pass my full-time income, I created a roadmap for getting to one million in revenue. Enjoy!
The math for a $1m newsletter is simple. All you need to do is get 2% of 100,000 subscribers to convert on purchasing a $250 course. And you need to send 2 newsletters per week, with 1 ad spot per newsletter and sell each spot for $5,000 for a total of 104 ad spots per year. Simple? Yes. Easy? No.
Summary
- 100,000 subscribers
- 2% conversion rate
- $250 course
- 2 newsletters/week
- 1 ad spot per newsletter
- $5,000 per ad spot
Course Revenue
- 100,000 x 2% = 1,000 conversions
- 2,000 x $250 = $500,000 revenue
Ad Revenue
- 52 weeks/year * 2 newsletters/week = 104 ad spots
- 104 x $5,000 = $520,000 revenue
Source: The Math Behind a $1M newsletter
Strategies & Tips
These are random tweets or threads that I bookmarked with the intention of applying these to my own strategy. Many of them are worth reading and adopting.
- Sahil’s flywheel
- $1M per year
- starting newsletters 1.5 hour session
- viral tweets from Justin
- choose a niche
- Content flywheel (Matt Pocock shared this as helpful)
- How 7-Figure Newsletters Work (thread of threads)
- YT video $800K/year writing 5 newsletters online
- Justin’s 7-step process
- The playbook to hit 100k subs
- 5k in 200 days
- Twitter Growth Strategy:
- In just 10 months, he hit 100k followers. His recipe for growth:
- Hyperfocus on Twitter:
- Engage with 15-20 tweets per day
- Write 1-2 tweets per day
- 1 thread per week
- Repeat until you hit 100k followers…
- I grew my newsletter from 0 to 5k subscribers in 100 days
- thread on how to get to 20k