Transcription
This guy gets paid $5,000 with every email he sends—$5,000, one email. It's pretty insane, right? But that's actually nothing compared to these guys who are pulling in $55,000 with every email sent.
Now, I've been obsessed with this, and I spent hundreds of hours studying how these guys did it. And you know what? I'm not just researching, but I'm actually secretly building this for myself.
Now I got to be honest with you, this is not a flashy or sexy business, but it's quietly making a lot of people very wealthy behind closed doors. And this is the power of the newsletter business—but not the kind of newsletters that you might think. 'Cause you don't want those emails that you get after you shop at Target, or maybe you bought something at Lululemon, and you got this kind of email. Yeah, that's not the newsletter I'm talking about. I'm talking about creator-led newsletters.
So these newsletters are not designed to push products, but they're focused on delivering value on a specific topic that people actually look forward to getting. Give you an example here: The Hustle, which is a newsletter started by Sam Parr, talking about startup news. He started this newsletter and grew it to $15 million a year, and he later sold it for mid eight figures. Or Morning Brew, who started by Austin Rief in his dorm room. He brewed it and sold it for $75 million. And remember, this is not some huge AI startup that's backed by Venture Capital funding; it is simply a newsletter business.
Now I know what you're thinking: These are probably huge newsletters; maybe these guys are serial entrepreneurs. What about regular people just like us? Well, there are plenty of success stories I'm about to share with you in this video of regular people making six figures from their newsletters. So just to give you a quick pick here, we got Ben Collins, who's making six figures from a newsletter talking about Google Sheets—not some trending AI tool, but plain old Google Sheets. And what about this farmer that's making $18 million a year with his newsletter, and he only has one employee?
So if that's interesting to you, you want to stick around, because in the next few minutes I'm going to break down why the creator-led newsletter is such a great business model; how small newsletters are surprisingly making tons of money; and as a bonus, I'll share some tips on the quickest ways to grow your newsletter, even if you have zero audience, 'cause I grew mine from zero to 30,000 subscribers in about 12 months.
So let me tell you why this is a great business model. Number one: With newsletters, you own your audience instead of renting it. Now most people think that their social media accounts are their biggest asset, but that's not actually the case. You've probably heard of countless stories of people getting banned on social media; maybe they've violated some random policy. But regardless of whose fault it is, they can get banned or even lose the account entirely, and there's absolutely nothing they can do about it. But with newsletters, you own your audience; you own that email list. 'Cause if something happens to your email platform, you can always bring your list and simply move to another one. And this is exactly why you'll see most big creators have an email list or a newsletter, because they know that it is an asset that they completely own.
Number two: It's a super lean business model. If you're selling products, you have to buy a bunch of inventory. And I've always thought that being a YouTube creator is quite lean as well, but you still have to go through so much just to produce a video like this: You got to research, you got to write the script, film, and edit it, right? And I'm not saying you can't make money with this model, but there's a lot of overhead, which means that there's more on the line if things don't work out. But on the other hand, with newsletters, you just have to write one newsletter a week. You don't have to be on camera; you don't need any fancy equipment; it's just writing. Now you can start by yourself and scale it to six figures and still write the newsletter yourself if you want to, 'cause Sam Parr grew it to a million dollars, and he still only has one writer, and that's it. Now I don't know any other business model like this. And not to mention the profit margin, which is in the high 90s, 'cause there's literally no cost to run the business other than the subscription cost to the email platform.
And speaking of subscription, you don't actually have to pay anything to start. So when I say $0, I do mean $0. Now you can start with Beehiiv; they've got a free plan until you hit 2,500 subscribers. Or if you go with ConvertKit, you can even go up to 10,000 subscribers completely for free.
Now let's talk about the juicy part: How much can you earn from this newsletter? How are these guys making $5,000 or $55,000 per email? Now there are a lot of ways, but I'm going to talk about the three biggest income sources for a newsletter.
Number one is brand sponsorships. Now this is Justin Welsh's newsletter, and based on the data I see, I'm estimating that he makes at least $5,000 a month with every newsletter that he sends. And let me tell you how I got to that number. So if you go to his website, he's got about 175,000 subscribers at the moment. And if you go to his sponsorship page, you'll see that he charges $2,500 per ad spot. Now we know that he has two spots per newsletter, so that is $5,000 per email—email that he sends—assuming that he fills every spot, and it looks like he does, 'cause he's booked out for a couple months in advance here. So $5,000 a week times four is $20,000 a month, and that is the minimum he's earning every single month from the newsletter. He can always write twice a week, and that will just simply double his income. And keep in mind that that is just one source of income, 'cause remember he has a program here as well, and he uses his newsletter to also promote this product, which brings me to the next source of income: selling products.
A good example of this is Ben Collins, the creator that I mentioned earlier, who created a newsletter around Google Sheets. So the way he makes a majority of his revenue is by selling Google Sheet templates. So when Ben first started, he grew his list to just about 2,000 subscribers—not a huge audience—but his very first course generated $7,000 in revenue from 2,000 people. And when he grew his list to 50,000 subscribers, he actually launched another course, which was priced at $1,500 per student, and now he's consistently generating six figures from his newsletter business.
And number three, which I think is one of the most profitable ways to do this, is to create a paid newsletter. So for those of you who are new, there are two types of newsletters: the free option and the paid option, right? So the paid option is like subscribing to somebody else's Patreon.
Now let me share one of the most mind-blowing examples I've ever come across with paid newsletters. So there's this guy, Kevin Van Trump, a farmer from Missouri. I first heard about him on Sam Parr's podcast, uh, and his story is absolutely insane. So this guy, Kevin, created a newsletter about something very, very specific, which is agricultural commodity markets. So he started a newsletter, grew it to about 30,000 subscribers, which is not massive by any means, but here's the kicker: These are not free subscribers, right? Each one of them pays $600 per year to be on the list. So if you do the math real quick: 30,000 subscribers multiplied by $600 per year, that's $18 million in annual recurring revenue from a newsletter about farming. And if that's not crazy enough, he actually runs the entire operation with just one writer—right, one person—$18 million. So that is the power of creating highly specialized content for a specific audience, 'cause when you solve real problems for real people, they'll gladly pay you month after month, year after year.
Now, writing newsletters can take a lot of time, especially coming up with fresh content week after week, 'cause you got to make sure that it's engaging, and then you can optimize it for SEO if you want it to perform well on your website, and it can eat up hours of your day. But that's where AI comes in—not to replace you, but to speed up your process significantly. So I've been experimenting with this tool, SEO Writing AI, who's kindly sponsoring this video, and I'm honestly impressed about what you can do. So you know how when you ask a regular AI tool like ChatGPT to write something for you, it comes out sounding like a robot, right? Nothing like how you'd actually talk to your audience. So that's where SEO Writing really shines. So they have this feature called Brand Voice that captures your unique writing style. And let me show you how it works. So once you log in, you want to head over to the Brand Voice section here and click on "New Brand Voice." Now this is a part where you can upload some samples of the things that you've written before—maybe your previous newsletters or blog posts—and the more examples you give it, the better it is going to be at mimicking your style, because it actually analyzes your writing pattern and it gives you a little bit of a summary of your style before you save it. And they even have this feature called The Humanizer Tool where you can take your existing content and make it more human—right, more conversational—and still optimize for SEO. So for this example, I'm going to start a new project about how to grow a YouTube channel, and I'll have the AI suggest some catchy titles here, and you can keep it regenerating until you find the one that grabs you, right? Now since we're writing a newsletter, we don't want this to be too long, obviously, so you want to select "X-Small" here, so you'll get about 600 words for the final output. Now this next step is really important because you want your newsletter to sound human, right? So for the AI model, I want to try the "new deeps V3 and real-time search." And one more thing: You can add, if you want some specific details that you want included in this newsletter, you can add it here, and it will blend that information nicely in the newsletter. And the really cool part is that you can even have it generate custom images for your newsletter and even embed YouTube videos. Now since we're creating content that will also live on your website, we got to make it SEO-friendly, right? So you can either add your own keywords or let the AI figure out the best ones. Now personally, I let the AI do its thing, 'cause I think it's pretty smart about it, and just hit "Run," and just wait for a couple seconds, and that's it. You want to click on these three dots here and hit "View" to see what's created. Now you see that you've got a complete newsletter written in a human voice with all the headings and even the citations to back up what you're saying, right? And even an FAQ section that Google absolutely loves for SEO. And you know one of my favorite features about this is the Deep Web and citation feature, so it pulls real-time data from all over the internet, so your newsletter or your content always has the most up-to-date information. Now, of course, you always want to go back and make sure the information is up to your standards, but think about the time this saves you, right? What would normally take you hours is done just in a few minutes. So if you want to give this tool a try, you can just click on the link below and use code JSON25 for 25% off your subscription. And thanks again, SEO Writing, for sponsoring this video.
Now I'm going to share with you the three quickest ways to grow your newsletter, even if you have zero audience. Number one is newsletter swaps. So this is a very simple concept: You basically feature someone else's newsletter to your audience, and they do the same for you. There's no money changing hands; you're just sharing audiences. And an example of someone who's done this successfully is Michael H, and he actually has done this multiple times. So Michael has a newsletter that focuses on startup advice, and he's using this newsletter swap method to grow his list to 70,000 subscribers in 13 months, and now he's earning over $100,000 every single month. Now if you guys want to find someone to do swaps with, you can always check out the network of creators on whatever email service provider you're using. If you go with ConvertKit, they have the creator network; Beehiiv has Boost; and Substack has something called Recommendations, so you can go through these and search for your niche or industry and find other creators who might be open for a swap like this. Now if you're wondering, the swaps that Michael did were pretty straightforward, and this method helped him get a lot of traction, but you know what? He actually paired it with another strategy, which is posting organic content on X. So the idea with this is to give free value on these platforms and link back to your newsletter with a call to action. So, for example, have you guys heard of The Rundown AI newsletter? So the founder, Ran Jon, built his newsletter by simply writing really good threads on X. So he didn't run ads or anything fancy; he just consistently posted valuable content about AI when it was starting to blow up. So this was back in 2022, and he actually hit 300,000 subscribers in just four months, which is insane. And today he's got about a million subscribers, and he's expanded to all different verticals like The Rundown Tech and Rundown Robotics.
Now the third method actually pays you to build your email list, and this is through creating videos on YouTube. Yes, creating videos takes more effort than just writing threads on X, but like I said, you're essentially getting paid to promote your own newsletter. So let me explain. So this is something that most people don't realize, 'cause when you search for something on Google—let's say you search for "how to market a startup"—what do you see that's pretty high up on search results? YouTube videos. And when somebody clicks and watches your YouTube videos, you'll earn money from the ads that you run on these videos before they even get funneled into your newsletter. And because more and more people actually love watching videos than reading from blogs, you can get a lot of subscribers really quickly. And as you can see, a lot of big creators are doing this as well: Ali Abdaal with his Life Notes newsletter, and Cody Sanchez with her Contrarian Thinking newsletter, who got 250,000 subscribers in just three years and $4 million in annual revenue, and now they have about 750,000 subscribers. Now I've grown my list from zero to 30,000 subscribers in just about 12 months from this method alone, and that is by creating YouTube videos, and I'm getting paid from the ads that's being run on my videos. By the way, if you want me to reveal my revenue numbers on my newsletter, leave a comment below and make sure you subscribe and turn on the notification bell, 'cause I might share that in the next video. But it doesn't stop here; running ads is just one thing. You can also have brands sponsor your videos. And think about it: When you have brands reaching out to you for sponsorships, you can also offer your newsletter ad spots, which means now you have two different spots to sell to the same brand, which will increase your bottom line. Now I've got tons of other unconventional ways to promote your newsletter that I can't probably fit in this video, so if you want that list, I have a link where you can download it for free down below.
Now most people, when they hear "starting a YouTube channel," they say it's too saturated; competition is insane, right? But that couldn't be further from the truth. What if I told you that YouTube is actually heavily promoting new and smaller creators right now? 'Cause you got a brand new channel like Daniel here who got 35,000 views on his very first video, and he's got three videos so far, and he's got over 10,000 subscribers. Or what about this creator who got more than 4 million views on his very, very first video? This one's just insane. Now YouTube's algorithm has got a massive upgrade, and it's creating the perfect window of opportunity for new creators just like this. So if you want to see exactly what that upgrade is and the video styles that are blowing up right now on YouTube, you want to check out this video here that I did, which is sitting at around 1.2 million views right now. So click here, and I'll see you guys there.