How To Make Money From Newsletters: 5 Ways To Monetize

The newsletter is the new buzzword. You can make money creating a newsletter on Substack, Medium, Ghost, Revue, or other newsletter creating platforms.

Creating a newsletter and writing about the topic of your interest could help you make a lot of money. Make money writing is hard but if you are consistent, good things will happen. I started a newsletter on Substack and try to monetize it in different ways; I have shared my learnings in this article. One thing I learned is that running a newsletter is hard; it takes time and effort to make it a success. But, if you choose to publish weekly articles, it is easy to manage and run a newsletter.

There is a free platform like Substack where you could start a newsletter for free and another where you have to pay a yearly fee in order to create a newsletter. If money is the problem, choose Substack or any other free newsletter creating platforms, in the long-term, a platform like Ghost that charges a yearly fee is good and profitable for you.

Pros and Cons of running a newsletter:

After a year of running a newsletter, I have learned some of the pros and cons of having a newsletter.

Some pros of running a newsletter:

• Your posts or letters reach directly to your subscriber email box. The biggest pro for having a newsletter. Email marketing is a powerful tool and very effective.
• If you choose the right platforms to share your content, you could compound your email subscriber rate. Your posts are always there conspire for you.
• Building a community around a common interest is the most Internet thing to do. You are a prime target for sponsorship from many companies working in the industry you are writing about.
• You can use just any social media platform to promote your newsletter and the side effect could be that you be an influencer on that social media platform.

Cons of running a newsletter:

In my opinion, running a newsletter is in itself a hectic job. You have to show up every single day and write for your audience. To keep the quality intact, you have to do research. I, being a writer on multiple platforms and running a YouTube channel, it is a hard job to manage all those resources.

If you just writing in your newsletter; it is easier.

Note: Your newsletter is your blog; many platforms now give you the opportunity to have a custom domain that could help you in getting more organic traffic.

5 Ways to make money on your Newsletter:

Remember, there are more ways to make money. These 5 ways to make money from the newsletter is just the one used by many writers.

1. Running a paid newsletter:

This is what I do. Runnin a paid newsletter means; you write some posts just for paying subscribers and a few for people who are free subscribers. Paying readers to pay a monthly fee like $3 to $10 in order to read your articles. The good thing about running a paid newsletter that MRR. MRR stands for Monthly Recurring Revenue which means ‘this is how much money you will receive on monthly basis’

A $100 MRR means you will receive $100 every month.

Can people really pay to read your stories? I have this doubt when I was starting out a newsletter, now I have three paying subscribers. This means that if you are consistent and write weekly articles for your paying subscribers related to the topic of your interest, you can get more paying subscribers. There are writers who are making over a Million dollars every year running a paid newsletter.

Running a paid newsletter means you just have to sign-up or connect your Stripe account and you are good to go. Some popular platform for creating a paid newsletter is Substack, Ghost, and Revue.

2. Affiliate marketing:

You could use the power of affiliate marketing to link to products or courses that could help you earn money from running a newsletter. Your newsletter is your blog.

Having a custom domain attached to your newsletter could help you get ranked on major search engines which in turn helps you get more traffic. In my opinion, Amazon affiliate marketing is dead, but there are other companies or products that have a high commission rate that you could try.

I recently found out that some affiliate products give a recurring revenue. If they are giving a 30% recurring revenue on a product and the product cost $300, every year you will receive $100 from that one single customer. If you think about this in the long-term, it is a very good opportunity for anyone to put hard work into those affiliate products.

3. Sponsorship:

I follow a Substack newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers that is free to everyone, it is called Not boring, it is a free newsletter but runs sponsorship and makes money through this method. If the writer could choose to convert his publication or newsletter to pay to read, he might end up making more money but running a paid newsletter reduce your chances of getting more eyeballs.

But, how would companies know that you have big email subscribers on your newsletter?

The answer is; creating a brand on Twitter and Linkedin. Twitter is a great platform for reach and almost every company's social handle is on Twitter. This could help you reach your target audience. It definitely takes time but you could make more money while keeping things open to everyone.

4. Selling your own products/services

Writing online is powerful. Whatever you do, you should write about it on different platforms, or creating your own newsletter or publication could do the trick.

If you have any digital assets, start writing about that topic and introduce your present and future readers to your courses or digitals products. When you are an expert, it shows from your writings. When someone is reading the in-depth details in your article, they feel that you know more about this niche and hence, anyone would be happy to invest money into buying your stuff, including me.

5. Embed your blog links or other monetized entities:

You can create a brand targeting a specific niche and promoting your social media accounts or other monetized entities using your newsletter.

Having a good social media following could be a stepping stone in your success with attracting brands. When you have a userbase that is interested in specific topics, it is good for brands to advertise to them. By mentioning your social media handles, you are growing your userbase and this could increase your reach which in turn translates into earnings.

Medium is a unique case study:

On Medium, you pay $5 a month to read the content. Substack or other newsletter platforms are very inclusive but Medium.com is more community-driven. In other newsletter platforms, you receive 90% of the monthly subscription pie and you only get paid for the number of paying subscribers you have. In the case of Medium, every paying subscriber could read your article and you will get paid for that. This makes Medium a potential alternative to Substack.

If you compare your subscription with other newsletter platforms, Medium gives you the opportunity to read a wide variety of articles from a range of authors. Medium also has a great SEO which in turn could help you get more search engine readers.

Read more articles:

• What is Substack? A Substack Review And How Much Does It Cost?

• Medium Vs Substack: Which newsletter-making platform is best for writers?