3 Signs You’re Ready to Start a Newsletter

Because being a content creator without being independent sucks.

I made my first dollar online in July 2018 by selling online courses. Ever since I learned a lot about the art of making money online.

I studied the strategies of people way ahead of me and scaled my own business to multiple 6-figure profits per year.

My journey taught me that there are many different ways to monetize your skills and build a profitable online business. But I learned that there’s one inevitable part of the equation: building an email list.

A content creator without an email list is dependent, insecure, and vulnerable because he relies on external platforms and can’t fully control his income.

A creator with an email list, however, has the chance to be independent and run a profitable business that doesn’t depend on a platform.

I know that starting a newsletter can sound like a huge step when you’re at the beginning of your journey — especially if you don’t know what to do with that newsletter. But if there’s one thing I learned in the past years, it’s that it’s never too early to start your email list.

You have a clear message

The moment you know what you want to share with the world, you’re ready to start a newsletter.

If that message is helpful and valuable, there’s a high probability that you can build a profitable online business thanks to your newsletter.

In case you’re wondering what exactly a clearly defined message is, here’s a simple template:

I help ______ to ______.

If you can complete that sentence, you have a clear message and a value proposition for your audience.

Here are a few examples:

• I help writers to build a profitable and reliable online business.
• I help ambitious people to eliminate distractions and be more productive.
• I help women to be more confident.
• I help ambitious people to manage their finances.
• I help people to learn faster and remember more.

Having a clear message is also a great help for you.

Once you have a promise, serving your audience through relevant content becomes so much easier.

If you don’t have a clearly defined message but create content on multiple topics and themes, you can still start a newsletter. In that case, the difference is that people will mainly sign up to stay in touch with you.

Either way, you can use a newsletter to keep your audience up to date and serve them with emails and content they enjoy.

You care about your audience

Imagine the following: You have a huge following on a platform like Instagram or Youtube. Your audience deeply appreciates your content and loves to follow your journey.

One day, you’re trying to log in to show up for your audience, and *poof* you realize that your account is banned.

Maybe you did something wrong. Maybe it was a mistake on their end. The reason doesn’t matter. Your account is gone. Your content is gone, and your following is gone.

If you managed to monetize your efforts, your income is gone as well.

And either way, your audience is gone.

Suddenly, you can’t communicate with your audience members anymore.

You could start a new account, but it’d take ages to build your profile. Even then, you’d have lost lots of people who enjoyed following you because they’ll likely never come across your new profile.

If you had a newsletter, getting banned on a platform would still suck, but it’d suck a lot less.

With a newsletter, you could stay in touch with your audience.

You could tell them what happened and ask them to follow your new profile so they can stay in touch with you.

And above all, you could continue to show up and create valuable content by writing emails.

You want freedom

A solid newsletter equals freedom.

Having a huge audience on any platform is nice, but a follower is not the same as an email subscriber. Once you have an email list, you essentially have a business.

Email marketing isn’t always simple, but if done correctly, it’s hugely effective and profitable.

On content creation platforms, you’re always dependent on algorithms and platform changes. With an email list, however, you can control 100% of your monetization efforts.

You can decide which products to create and sell and when to do that.

You have way more opportunities for brand sponsorships and collaborations with other creators.

You can drive traffic to your free content.

You can engage with your audience and find out more about them by running surveys and asking them to reply to your emails.

Successfully monetizing your email list requires a wider skill set than just creating content on one platform, but given that a newsletter can help you to achieve true freedom, the price is worth it.

Without an email list, most creators quickly find themselves in a content creation hamster wheel.

We’re often talking about the hamster wheel in terms of a 9-to-5 job, but the harsh reality is that most content creators and entrepreneurs leave their jobs to create their own hamster wheels.

They might like what they do and might not have an annoying boss, but they’re still not independent. They constantly need to show up and create something new.

With an email list, your life as a creator can be so much more relaxed because you know that you can easily make money by creating a product that’ll be helpful to your audience.

In the end, email marketing is less about the tech stuff and more about value and trust.

Here’s how to start

If you’re brand new to the world of online business and digital marketing, starting your newsletter can seem challenging.

But it isn’t. The gist is to keep it simple and move on by taking baby steps.

When I started my first newsletter two years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. In the meantime, almost 30,000 people subscribed to my email list.

You don’t need to know everything to take the first step. All you need to do is start.

Pick your email marketing tool

Even though you can change your email marketing tool anytime, I’d highly recommend that you choose one that sounds promising.

My favorite tool is Convertkit — it’s simple and easy to use but provides more than just the basics.

I’ve spent lots of time researching and trying multiple tools, but none of them came close to Convertkit, which even has a free plan.

If you want to keep it even simpler, I’d recommend Substack.

Substack is mainly utilized for paid newsletters, but you can also use it to run your free email list.

It’s even simpler than Convertkit, but also less powerful. The moment you want to monetize your email list by selling products, you’ll likely feel stuck with Substack.

Create a lead magnet

The most tricky part of building a newsletter is getting people to subscribe.

Why should I trust you? Why should I share my email address with you? What’s in it for me?!

We mostly solve this problem by providing lots of value upfront through a so-called freebie or lead magnet.

A freebie is a free product your subscriber receives in exchange for their trust and for joining your email list.

This can be a free course, a PDF, a checklist, templates, or anything else. The only non-negotiable is that it’s of value for your audience.

Let’s have a look at the value propositions we talked about above and see how we could add a valuable freebie for these audience members:

• I help writers to build a profitable and reliable online business: This is the value proposition of my business and I have two different freebies for aspiring writers: A free 5-day course and a cheat sheet to overcome writer’s block.
• I help ambitious people to eliminate distractions and be more productive: In this case, you could offer a checklist to eliminate distractions and be more focused.
• I help women to be more confident: In this case, you could offer a guided meditation that helps your audience member to feel more confident and secure.
• I help ambitious people to manage their finances: In this case, you could provide a template to track expenses and income.

You get the point: A freebie is all about convincing your potential subscriber that your email list is worth it by giving them a little gift upfront.

With most email marketing tools, you can automate the process so that your subscriber immediately receives the freebie after signing up.

Unfortunately, this isn’t possible with Substack. If you know that you’ll use a freebie, I’d recommend avoiding Substack as your email marketing tool.

If you don’t have a clear message and struggle to develop an idea for a freebie, you could go with a call to action like “Sign up to my newsletter to stay in touch.”

This is not a mistake, but it’s way less effective than having a strong call to action with a valuable freebie.

Decide on your schedule

The biggest struggle beginners face when they start their newsletter is what to put inside the emails.

First things first: Don’t think about promoting products or services too early.

Nobody will buy your products or use your affiliate links if they barely know you.

In the beginning, your newsletter should be all about building trust and consistency.

I highly recommend committing to a regular newsletter (e.g., once per week) so you show up regularly. If someone signs up to your email list but doesn’t hear from you for a month, they’ll likely forget who you are and never open your emails.

The easiest way to start a weekly letter is by doing a little recap of your week.

Share the content you produced. Share the content of other creators you enjoyed. Let them know what’s going on in your life and business.

Sometimes, you might have an interesting idea for a separate email. In that case, just go ahead and send another email. Just because you call it a weekly newsletter doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to send emails in between.

If you consistently serve your audience with valuable insights and gain their trust, they’ll want to hear more from you and eventually pay for your products and services.

And in the end, that’s the only way to be a truly independent creator and live life on your own terms.

Wanna build or scale your online business but don’t know HOW? Download my FREE Framework.