Building the foundation for my newsletter venture
What I've done so far (and a look into the potential)
Welcome to update #1 of the Growing Newsletters newsletter :)
First, thanks for following my journey. It means a lot. It’s also kinda scary because I don’t really know what I’m doing. You probably know more about newsletters than I do.
My goal is to build AND learn in public though. So, you’ll witness everything I do. My successes, my failures, my highs, my lows.
I love following people’s journeys from the start because I get to see all their progress and have context for their successes. It’s real. It’s inspiring. It’s like they’re blazing a path that I can follow too if I so choose.
Examples that come to mind are when Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits built Own The Yard publicly in his Niche Site Project 4, and Scott DeLong’s current newsletter challenge.
Although my following is nothing like those guys’, I’m humbled to have a small audience and be in the position where I can embark on my own journey with a few people following along.
I hope this journey is inspiring.
Background of this journey
In all my time building online businesses, one thing I’ve largely ignored is building a newsletter.
I’ve been into SEO and building niche sites for over six years, and hadn’t built a newsletter until about 4 months ago when I launched Niche Site Growth.
Last August, I had an idea for a website where I’d curate success stories from around the web since I love reading them. I realized if I were to do that, building a newsletter would be a smart idea.
Not long after, Scott DeLong launched his $20K to $500K in one year challenge. 13,000 people - myself included - followed him to watch the journey.
Scott’s challenge - particularly seeing the numbers and reading about his strategy - is what inspired me to focus more on the newsletter component of my idea.
As I looked more into the newsletter space, I began to see so much potential for all sorts of newsletters. That’s when I had the idea for The Slick Pixel, since I’m passionate about good web design and think it would be fun to share my favorite examples with a similarly passionate audience.
So, I’m starting two newsletters - Success Highlight and The Slick Pixel.
Before going into a business, I like to look at the potential numbers to see if it’s even worthwhile. I always knew newsletters were valuable assets, but until recently I didn’t realize HOW valuable they can be.
Here’s a look at the potential. I could be way off here as I’m not an expert, but I suppose I won’t know until I have a lot more subscribers and can make more accurate projections.
Potential numbers
First, let’s look at Success Highlight.
It’ll be a hybrid website + newsletter. Twice a week, I’ll send out the newsletter which will have an abridged success story you can read in 2 minutes or less. At the end of the email there’ll be a link to read the full story on the website.
Everyone loves reading success stories, so the potential audience size is pretty much limitless.
My audience will be pretty broad, so sponsors will probably pay a CPM of $30 or less. I’ll go with $20 just to low-ball it. That’s $20 for every newsletter I send out, assuming I can find a sponsor for each issue.
I’m also monetizing Success Highlight with SparkLoop’s Upscribe feature which shows a popup after people subscribe asking if they want to subscribe to a few other newsletters as well. If they do, I get a few dollars for each. I have no idea what the earning potential is, but I would guess it’s a few hundred per thousand subscribers. I really don’t know though.
Affiliate marketing is another monetization strategy I’ll use. For example, if I feature a success story of someone who built a successful Shopify store, I’d include an affiliate link to Shopify. If a reader signed up through my link, I’d get $150. The earning potential here really depends on the program I recommend.
Finally, I’ll put ads on the Success Highlight website which will likely earn me $20-$30 per 1,000 visitors. Each time I send an email, a percentage of people will click to read the whole story. I don’t know what that percentage will be, but for the sake of this example, let’s go with 15%.
So, based on my calculations, here’s the earning potential for different subscriber amounts:
1,000 subs:
Sponsors: $160/mo (8 newsletter issues per month)
Upscribe: $50/mo (depends on growth rate, since it’s a fixed payment - not recurring. So this is simply a wild guess.)
Affiliate: $50/mo (this will vary widely, so this is also a wild guess)
Ads: $5/mo
Total: $265/mo
10,000 subs: just multiply everything by 10, and the total comes out to $2,650/mo
100,000 subs: $26,500/mo
1,000,000 subs: $265,000/mo
With 1,000,000 subscribers, which is my goal, the newsletter would be worth $7,950,000 assuming a 30x multiplier on monthly revenue (typical for niche sites, I don’t know about newsletters).
That also means each subscriber is worth just under $8 (as long as my wild estimates are accurate haha).
The above numbers are for a twice-weekly sending frequency. I hope to make it a daily newsletter down the road though which will increase the potential by a rather significant margin :).
Now, let’s look at the potential for The Slick Pixel.
This will just be a newsletter. I don’t plan to put any focus on the site for now. It’s also a daily newsletter, so the sponsorship earning potential is quite a bit higher as long as I get sponsors for each issue.
The audience is a little more niche as well. Everyone loves success stories, but not everyone loves web design and UX examples. With a more targeted audience, sponsors are more likely to pay a higher CPM. Let’s say $30, though I think it could be higher in reality.
I’ll also monetize The Slick Pixel with affiliate links to various web design-related software. I don’t know what just yet, so it’s impossible to say what the potential here is. For the sake of this example though, I’ll use the same number as in my Success Highlight guesstimate.
Here’s the earning potential for different subscriber amounts for The Slick Pixel:
1,000 subs:
Sponsors: $900/mo ($30 CPM x 30 days in a month, since it’s a daily newsletter)
Affiliate: $50/mo
Total: $950/mo
10,000 subs: $9,500
You can work out the numbers from there, but my goal is to hit a $100,000 valuation which could be achieved with 3,500-4,000 subscribers assuming the above numbers are accurate :)
I find those numbers very inspiring, even if they’re silly guesses.
Now, moving on to what I’ve done to build each newsletter so far:
Building the foundation of Success Highlight
This is already getting quite long so instead of writing tons of paragraphs, I’ll use bullet points :)
Built successhighlight.com using WordPress (.org) and Elementor Pro.
Signed up for ConvertKit and put the subscribe form on the site.
Created a Google form for people to submit their success stories. I’ll probably have to re-work it a few times before I’m happy with it. This is just the first draft. With that said, I’d love for you to submit a success story if you have one to share!
Created a Twitter account for the brand.
Wrote the first success story (which was just sent out Monday!)
Announced it on Twitter :)
The next steps are to ramp up organic (free) marketing, which I plan to do through the Twitter account (maybe posting threads where I break down various success stories?) and to do recommendation swaps with similar newsletters.
Once it starts to earn money, I plan to reinvest that into Facebook ads to accelerate growth.
…and for The Slick Pixel
Since the website isn’t a big component, I decided to use beehiiv for this newsletter.
Created a Twitter account for the brand.
Wrote 4 emails so far (the first three have already gone out).
Announced it on Twitter along with Success Highlight.
The next steps are to grow the Twitter account and do recommendation swaps until it starts earning enough to pay for Facebook ads.
Current numbers
Through my launch tweet on Friday which got over 3,800 views, the Newsletter Blueprint Discord I’m a member of, and my Niche Site Growth newsletter, here’s how many subscribers each newsletter has:
Success Highlight: 13
The Slick Pixel: 20
And just for fun, Growing Newsletters (the one you’re reading): 27
Success Highlight has fewer subscribers either because it doesn’t seem as interesting to my current audience, or, more likely, because it has double opt-in enabled. Convert Kit doesn’t let me make a welcome email without using double opt-in for some reason. If I upgrade to a paid plan, I can make an automated welcome email that doesn’t require the confirm subscription button, but I’m not upgrading just for that.
It makes sense that Growing Newsletters has the most subscribers right now. Once the other two start to get organic reach however, I think they’ll grow much larger since more people are interested in those topics than in a newsletter growth case study.
Admittedly, I thought my launch tweet would get a lot more traction than it did. My tweets oftentimes get hundreds of likes and tens of thousands of views, so I thought an ambitious (and live, URLs-revealed) case study would get a lot of eyeballs but apparently not.
My guess is that it was too unrelated to my typical focus, which is SEO and keyword research. Most of my followers aren’t interested in hearing about newsletters. It could also be due to the fact that I tweeted on a Friday afternoon and Twitter’s activity level was simply lower than at other times.
Who knows!
The results were a bit of a letdown, but a slow start won’t stop my journey. I can be thankful that I even have the platform to get a small head start. Certainly not something most people have when they just start out!
Wrap-up
I’m not exactly sure what these updates will look like moving forward. This is just the first issue of Growing Newsletters and there was a lot to cover.
Future issues will probably be a bit shorter, though I’ll share everything I learn and all the strategies I use along the way.
Hope you got some value out of today’s email. If you have any thoughts, feel free to reply.
Have a great rest of your week!
Ian
Super interesting! I started a newsletter after reading about Scott's challenge. I am an experienced entrepreneur, but have never done a niche site/content business before. Why did you decide to build "The Slick Pixel" as a newsletter only? I am currently not publishing my newsletter content on the platform I use (beehiive), because I cannot monetize it anyway and plan to switch the tool someday in the future. But it also sucks that the content is "lost" after send-out, so I am thinking about launching a Wordpress site as well. It would take me some time (as I have never done this before), but from your and Scott's writing I see the upside. What was your thinking on "The Slick Pixel"? Too niche audience?
Since I have no experience about what it takes to build a newsletter (and even less idea how to monetize), the intro was helpful to me just to understand some of the possibilities.