How to start a newsletter (and grow it) in 2024

Want to know how to start a newsletter and grow it? Here's my ultimate guide on how I built my newsletter and make a living as a content creator.

Omid Ghiam
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Omid G
How to start a newsletter (and grow it) in 2024

Two years ago, I quit my dream job at Webflow to start a newsletter business.

Was I crazy? Absolutely.

I almost went broke in my first year of business and lost around 80% of my savings the first year after I quit my job.

Today, however, I run a marketing newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers and also sell content marketing services to B2B SaaS companies. And through everything, I’m making around three times more than I did at my previous full-time job.

It wasn’t easy, though. And I definitely made a lot of mistakes. However, there were a few key things I got right that allowed me to create a nice following and a platform to help me attract clients and monetize my newsletter through affiliate marketing. (I haven’t even touched newsletter sponsorships yet and know that can be another big revenue stream if I decide to open it up.)

This is the article I wish I had when I first quit my job to start a newsletter. Do you need to quit in order to build a successful newsletter? No way, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a couple of screws loose like me.

But, hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll have a clear plan of action on how to start a newsletter (and grow it) successfully in 2024 (and many years to come).

Alright, let’s get straight into it.

Is it worth starting a newsletter?

The simple answer is... it depends. Yeah, that's not a very clear answer, I know. If you love writing and want a creative outlet without any desire to start a business with it, then by all means, do what your heart tells you to do. Having a creative outlet that brings joy into your life, even if it doesn’t make a penny, is 100% worth it. Optimize for joy.

However, if you want to start a newsletter and hope to turn it into a source of income, be it part-time or full-time, you’ll have to pay close attention to steps one and two of this guide.

The niche and strategy you use will determine whether your newsletter endeavor is a waste of time or a life-changing opportunity.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you whether it’s worth it to start a newsletter or not. Simply because it depends. And while it has been absolutely worth it for me, I know tons of newsletters that never see the light of day. It would be very biased of me to tell you what to do. (Never take anyone’s advice blindly.)

But I can tell you that if you find a gap in the market with content you believe will bring value to others, and you believe you have the knowledge and expertise to deliver that value better than anyone else, then yes, starting a newsletter is worth it. If anything, it is your duty to give your knowledge away.

They say money is in the list. And most businesses are built on a list. Be it a list of customers, a list of followers, or a list of email subscribers. I know email is a powerful marketing channel. It’s so powerful that my friend Melanie built a 7-figure email marketing agency and helps ecommerce companies drive millions in revenue from email.

Email also allows you to own your audience. As in, you’re not subject to algorithm changes or shadow bans as you can be on social media. Even if you decide to change your ESP (email service provider) one day, you can easily export your list and take it somewhere else.

How profitable is a newsletter?

Newsletters are generally monetized with sponsorships or ads. And the amount you can make depends on the amount of people that click on your ads. To advertisers, clicks are all that matters. So it’s not just about having a large email list — although generally the larger your audience the more you can charge per email sponsorship.

Let’s look at two cases:

  • Newsletter A: 10,000 subscribers, 50% open rate, 15% click-through rate
  • Newsletter B: 30,000 subscribers, 20% open rate, 4% click-through rate

Which newsletter do you think is worth more and can be more profitable?

At first glance, Newsletter B, with 30,000 subscribers, looks like the winner. If we break down the numbers, we can see that Newsletter B yields 240 clicks per email.

When we break down the numbers for Newsletter A, we can see that Newsletter A gets 750 clicks per email.

So, Newsletter A has the potential to be more profitable compared to Newsletter B, even though it has a third of its subscriber size.

Based on these numbers, you can charge anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to a couple thousand dollars per email sent. And this range really depends on the industry and audience you have.

For example, a newsletter about finance or marketing might make more than a newsletter about finding the best restaurants in New York City.

However, what’s the most important is who is on your email list. Advertisers pay to get in front of people. And if those people are key decision-makers who have a lot of money at their disposal, you’re going to be able to charge more per sponsorship.

Besides just sponsorships, the best way to make money from a newsletter is to sell something of your own. This could be services, courses, or even promoting affiliate products. However, we’ll get more into this in step 10 below.

Alright, without further ado, let’s get into my 10 steps for how to start a newsletter this year.

10 essential steps to starting a newsletter in 2024

Here are the 10 steps I used to start and grow my newsletter:

  1. Have an idea better than anyone else
  2. Map out your content production strategy
  3. Find a newsletter platform that fits your use case
  4. Build out your newsletter website
  5. Create a growth strategy to get email subscribers
  6. Design your email newsletter template
  7. Set up your DNS to send emails
  8. Write and send your first newsletter
  9. Monitor performance and analytics
  10. Find ways to monetize your newsletter

Alright, let’s get into each step in more detail.

1. Have an idea better than anyone else

The first step to launching a successful newsletter is to have a good idea — shocker! If people don’t find your newsletter informative, inspiring, or entertaining, they’re not going to stay subscribed for a long time.

With any content business, or really even any business, retention is the name of the game. The longer someone stays a subscriber, the more likely they are to share (in this case, forward) your emails to their friends and colleagues. This is not only a good indicator that you created something of value, but it also creates a cool growth loop for your newsletter.

One of the cool things I discovered a few months into my newsletter was that people were forwarding the email to their co-workers. I would see multiple people from the same company email join my newsletter and it was a clear sign that some sort of word-of-mouth was happening.

Again, this occurred because people found something of value in the newsletter. So much so, that they shared it with others. But here’s the thing: I didn’t create my newsletter solely for the purpose of making money.

Of course, there’s an incentive there to keep pushing when I’m not in a content-creation mood. But, my main intention was to have a creative outlet for myself.

I once heard Pat Flynn say on X (Twitter) that your content should be a gift to your audience. And while I do believe that to be true (and beautifully said), I would take it a step further. Your content should be a gift to yourself — your younger self.

Pat Flynn quote

That’s what my newsletter (and this blog) is. It’s for me. It’s my “diary” of my favorite thing — marketing (and behavioral economics). It’s what has kept me going curating content every single weekday for the past 4 years in a row (check out the homepage of this website). It’s what I love. And it’s for me because I want to continue being a great marketer.

When that’s the focus, you’ll find that others also see value in the gift you’re giving yourself, and it becomes their gift as well.

So what’s the takeaway? Find a content topic or idea YOU would subscribe to. Be it funny cat memes, curated content (from business to entertainment to food), educational stuff from your career, news about topics you care about, and so on. If there’s something you wish was out there, it means there’s a gap somewhere in the market. And you have an opportunity to fill that gap and give your gift to others.

This frame of mind is so powerful that I heard Mark Manson say on a podcast once that he wrote the book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F” for himself. He thought most self-development books were trash and he wrote his own because it was a book he had to read. That book went on to sell over 15 million copies and became a New York Times best seller.

Moral of the story? Create something you want to subscribe to.

2. Map out your content production strategy

Once you have a content idea you feel good about, it’s time to map out your content strategy. Burnout from the content hamster wheel is a real thing — it happened to me this past summer. So it’s important to create a publishing cadence you can keep up with.

If you’ve never started a newsletter before, I would not recommend sending emails daily. Start monthly. Then maybe go bi-weekly (twice a month). Then maybe go to weekly. And so on.

From the beginning, I started with weekly — and it’s been a cadence I’ve been able to keep up with. (However, there have been times I took a break because of life stuff — it happens.)

Here’s how I would go about mapping out your strategy:

  • Define your goals: Start with getting clear about what you want to achieve with your newsletter. Is it just a fun creative outlet you don’t care about monetizing? Is it something you want to do purely for business purposes? Or is it a mix of both? Knowing this will help you create a brand voice and identity. Here is a guide to help with that. Being edgy in your brand voice can help you build an audience by being relatable. But it can also limit your ability for companies that would want to collaborate with you. So, you need to find a balance based on your goals.
  • Define your audience: Who are your readers? Do they work in tech? In finance? In the healthcare industry? What are their hobbies? Do they like to surf? Play outdoor sports? The idea here is to create an ICP and give it a name. That way every time you’re writing a newsletter edition you can create it with your ICP in mind. However, if you remember in the previous section I mentioned that the best content you’ll create is the content you create for yourself. You know yourself better than anyone else. For me, my ICP is myself. When I started this newsletter, I was a marketer working in-house at a tech company. And now I freelance full-time. I create for me. And for those that are interested in the same professional path.
  • Define your content pillars: Here you want to think about the broader themes of your content. The thing with content businesses is they evolve as you figure out what works and what you like creating. For me, I love all aspects of marketing. So my content pillars tend to lean on: copywriting & SEO, product marketing, email marketing, growth marketing, and branding & web design. For someone who’s creating a newsletter about sustainable living, your pillars might be zero waste, sustainable fashion, and green technology. This part is heavily dependent on your interests.
  • Create a content calendar: When I first started my newsletter, I created a folder in my Google Drive called “Newsletter Editions,” and I wrote all my emails as Google Docs in that folder. I also used Asana and in a Kanban board view to map out all of my ideas, what was in progress, and what had been published — linking out to my Google Docs in those Asana tasks. Today, I combined my use case for Google Drive and Asana and just use Notion. I use the simple Notion content calendar template and it does the job for me. I also use this for my blog content as well.
Notion content calendar templates

Your content production strategy can be a long list of steps or a simple “open a Google Doc and get writing.”

In the beginning, you should do everything you can to eliminate friction in your creation process. Don’t think too much about being organized (I know that may not be the best advice but I’m not going to tell you to do something I didn’t do).

Just write your newsletter, send it to your 3 subscribers (one of which is probably one of your other emails), and evolve your process over time using the rest of the steps in this guide.

3. Find a newsletter platform that fits your use case

At its core, your newsletter content is what matters — not the platform or tools you use. A shovel can help you dig up the gold. But if you’re digging in the wrong spots, you won’t find the gold.

What the right newsletter platform can do for you is make the creation and sending process of your newsletter fun, rather than a chore. It also enables you to dig for the gold when you know where to dig.

When I first started my newsletter, I was using Mailchimp. People like to hate on it (I was one of them). But, to be honest, it’s a great platform. Mainly because they have their own sending infrastructure and it’s very reputable when it comes to email deliverability.

The downside for me was that I wanted a bit more flexibility in my newsletter designs without having to code actual HTML designs into Mailchimp. I ended up migrating my newsletter over to beehiiv when the company first launched, and as of writing this blog post, my newsletter is still on beehiiv. I’m not going to go into too much detail about why I chose beehiiv but I wrote a review on it if you want to check it out.

beehiiv newsletter platform

beehiiv, however, is not perfect. They’re fairly new in the newsletter game — as of writing this, they’re a little over two and a half years old. They’re innovating fast and do an amazing job of giving writers the features they need to create great-looking and engaging emails.

I only have two concerns with the platform. As of writing this, it’s not great if you want to integrate it with a separate website. beehiiv is taking the Substack approach where your newsletter editions live on a website platform that beehiiv created.

However, if you’re like me and you have a blog and want to integrate your newsletter with your blog, it gets a bit tricky. Right now, I use a beehiiv embed on my site (see the sidebar) to capture subscribers. It works, but I can’t customize the look that much, it’s an iFrame that adds a bit extra load time to my site, and I’ve had some weird bugs with it in the past.

beehiiv dashboard

I get it though, beehiiv is a new platform and I’m sure they will address some of these in the future. But, I think if I had to start over, knowing that I wanted a platform that integrated better with my Webflow site, I might have looked deeper into ConvertKit. When I started my newsletter, I had just quit my job at Webflow and I was broke (because I went crazy and traveled for a year with no income coming in). When I discovered beehiiv, I saw it had all the features I wanted and the free plan seemed very appealing. Even their paid plans (which I’m now on) are unheard of with how cheap they are.

It made ConvertKit seem unnecessarily expensive. But now I can see why ConvertKit charges the prices they do — they have a pretty reliable sender reputation which makes email deliverability a bit better than beehiiv at the moment. This is just what I’ve heard from friends — I can’t verify it for myself as of right now.

Regardless, both ConvertKit and beehiiv are great in their own ways. If you plan on just building a newsletter business then I would go with beehiiv. But if you plan on building more of a media company with different media channels outside of just a newsletter, ConvertKit might be the better option.

4. Build out your newsletter website

If you plan on just building a newsletter, this part is pretty much done for you. Platforms like Substack, ConvertKit, (and now) beehiiv have their own free website builders. When you launch your newsletter on these platforms, you’ll have a simple newsletter landing page by default.

Outlier Growth newsletter website
Outlier Growth uses beehiiv's default website builder

The upside is you don’t have to pay for another tool or go through the hassle of creating a separate website. The downside is you don’t have much control over the layout of your site.

Also, if you plan on growing your email list through SEO (like I do), I would highly recommend using a different website builder — preferably Webflow or WordPress (WordPress only if you use really fast hosting like WPEngine).

My favorite website builder is Webflow, and I’m not just saying that because I used to work there. I used the platform before I was an employee and it was my dream to work there. Somehow by sheer luck, it happened.

Webflow website builder

But I love Webflow for two reasons: 1) You have 100% design and creative freedom and 2) it’s the best for SEO in my opinion. I used to lead SEO at Webflow and the entire blog on Webflow is built with Webflow. And even this entire site you’re on right now is built in Webflow — and I outrank tons of huge media sites and SaaS companies. I’ve outranked HubSpot, Zapier, and even ConvertKit with some of my blog posts — I credit it to how I write for SEO but also the amazing technical aspects of how clean Webflow’s code is under the hood.

If you want to learn how to build a site in Webflow, I wrote a guide on their blog you can check out here. There are also some great videos on YouTube, or you can check out the Webflow University videos.

If we go to my current setup — beehiiv + Webflow — the way I make this possible is by using beehiiv’s sign-up embeds:

Marketer Milk homepage
Marketer Milk uses beehiiv + Webflow combo

It’s cool to see that as Marketer Milk has grown over the past few years, I’ve started to see more beehiiv + Webflow websites out in the wild.

Ariyh newsletter
Ariyh newsletter uses a beehiiv + Webflow combo

You’ll want to make sure you have clear CTAs (call-to-actions) on your website to sign up to your newsletter. You can even use exit-intent popups to help capture emails from website visitors. While many people claim to hate popups to gain subscribers, they are actually the #1 most effective way my newsletter grows. So the proof is in the data.

5. Create a growth strategy to get email subscribers

If you create a newsletter and no one reads it, do you have a newsletter?

One of my core philosophies for creating content is to make sure I know how it’s going to be distributed before I even start writing.

I put a lot of effort into the things I create and I want to help as many people as I can. So it’s my duty to make sure I have a solid marketing strategy in place so my content reaches the people who are looking for it.

There are a handful of different ways you can grow your email newsletter to make sure people read your emails. I’ll start by explaining some ways you can grow, and then I’ll explain exactly how I grow my newsletter (mostly passively).

Here are a few ways newsletters grow their email list:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) blog posts

Email subscribe pop up on blog post

Writing great blog posts (like this one) that are both helpful and rank well in Google. This is generally done through your website/blog and then you funnel people through an email pop-up or sign-up embed on your site to turn website visitors into subscribers.

Influencer marketing

This is where you can sponsor a creator in your niche to talk about your newsletter and what it’s about. This can work well if you find small creators on platforms like YouTube (my favorite for this type of growth strategy) and work out a deal to run a 30-second ad read about your newsletter on one of their videos.

I’ve personally done this only twice. One time it was a hit and it worked really well. The other time I spent even more and got little to no results.

Paid ads

This can be through platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. Any platform where you can find a community with your niche audience on it can be a way to attract newsletter subscribers through targeted ads.

DTC newsletter running Meta ads
DTC Newsletter runs Meta ads (source: Meta ads library)

This strategy is probably the most expensive way to get subscribers as it depends on the niche you’re targeting. It can cost anywhere from a couple of dollars to a decent amount of money to acquire just one subscriber. It’s not a strategy I’d recommend if you’re just starting out — your money is probably better spent by sponsoring a creator in your space.

Referrals

beehiiv's referral program for newsletters

Many newsletter platforms these days, like beehiiv, have a built-in referral marketing feature that allows you to give away freebies to your subscribers if they refer a friend or colleague to also subscribe to your newsletter.

The popular newsletter platform Morning Brew swears by this method to drive new subscribers. Their strategy involved giving subscribers things like free merch for a set number of referrals — incentivizing people to spread the word about their newsletter.

Personally, I’ve experimented with this strategy and have not gotten any big gains — maybe a referral here or there. It could also be my offer (a free PDF guide on SEO in exchange for just 1 referral). To be honest, I thought it was a great deal and it would do well, but It hasn’t been nearly as effective as some other strategies I’ve used that I’ll get into.

Social media content creation

One strategy I see working for a lot of newsletters, especially those that target working professionals, is posting on LinkedIn. I’m personally not the biggest fan of using social media platforms (be it for business or personal use) but I know it can work when done correctly.

I’ve also seen many newsletters grow fast through X (formerly Twitter) and produce tweet threads that go viral.

Matt Gray's X (Twitter) account to join newsletter
Matt Gray has a link to his newsletter in his X (Twitter) bio

I can’t speak for how well other platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok do, but I’m sure those have some efficacy as well. I know for professional newsletters, like mine that’s about marketing, LinkedIn is super powerful. I’ve had people mention my newsletter on LinkedIn and the day that it’s mentioned my daily subscriber count goes crazy and brings in about 3 times more than what I normally get.

I know I’m not leveraging social that well, but then again I’m not too concerned with growing fast. I like my little niche audience and the slow growth. Growing too fast gives me anxiety.

You can also leverage platforms like Pinterest to send traffic to your website and capture emails from there. This is why I’m a big believer in having your own website on the web. It’s your own virtual real estate and I will always vouch for having a separate website and a separate newsletter platform. Pinterest works well for many different niches.

Things like travel and inspiration for aesthetics and design do well on Pinterest. Although, lately I’ve also been seeing more business-related content that has gotten some traction on Pinterest. I’m in the early stages of using Pinterest as a marketing channel so once I get good at that I’ll report back and make some content on how I’m growing there. For now, recognize Pinterest as a visual search engine — there’s a big opportunity to grow if you can leverage Pinterest SEO.

YouTube videos

The last one I can think of and I personally know works is creating great YouTube videos and promoting your newsletter to your audience. I separated this one from social media content creation because I do see YouTube more as a video search engine. I know many people use it like a “social” media platform — especially now that YouTube Shorts have grown so much — but YouTube to me is just Google in video form.

Similarly to Google SEO, you can create evergreen content on YouTube and leverage YouTube SEO. I’ve done this in the past. In fact, this blog first started as a YouTube channel then I pivoted to blogging and SEO because it’s what I know best.

Graham Stephan newsletter on YouTube
Graham Stephan has his newsletter link in the bio of his YouTube videos

As you can see there are tons of different ways to grow your newsletter. I’m sure there are more strategies than I have mentioned here but these are the ones I’ve personally experimented with and can vouch for.

As promised at the beginning of this section, the method I use to grow is mainly through SEO. It’s my favorite. And as my newsletter has grown, some of my subscribers have come from word of mouth and people forwarding the emails to their friends and co-workers.

If there’s one piece of advice I would give, especially if you’re an individual creator like me and don’t have a lot of money to experiment with different channels, it’s to start with just one of these strategies and maximize it as much as you can before you add on another growth channel. If you naturally focus on growing with just one channel, and you have a great newsletter that people love, you’ll also get a nice word-of-mouth growth loop going as well.

6. Design your email newsletter template

The next step is to design your newsletter. This part depends on the platform you decide to use. Most newsletter platforms like beehiiv or ConvertKit give you all the email marketing tools you need to put something together that works and looks solid.

Before I sent my first newsletter edition a couple of years ago, I opened up Figma (a design tool) and drew out a rough outline of the different elements I wanted in my newsletter. The way I treat my newsletter is to have it be a digital magazine — with images, written content, external links and resources, and many more. You can also draw out this outline on a piece of paper.

The main thing is to find newsletters you love and take elements of them you like. No one really has an original idea these days. Even my own newsletter has been copied by many other marketing newsletters out there (even down to the orange/yellow color of my branding) — some even have more subscribers than me now. I don’t hate though. It validates the idea I had to create a marketing curation newsletter.

However, I did take inspiration from other newsletters outside of my niche. Specifically, I got inspiration from design newsletters and even the Webflow newsletter that I used to manage (with over 500K subscribers).

beehiiv has a super simple drag-and-drop editor to create an email template. Check out their step-by-step guide on exactly how to do this:

Now that you set up your email template, you’re almost ready to send your first email. However, there are some technical things that you should think about before you do this — especially if you plan on using a custom domain to send your emails.

Let’s go over this in the next section.

7. Set up your DNS to send emails

This is where things get a little technical. But do not worry, because learning about the technical side of running a newsletter is actually quite fascinating.

If you want to send your emails from a custom domain, it’s highly recommended that you set up a few records in your DNS (where you purchased your domain).

Sender reputation is really important when it comes to sending emails. And if you have a lot of subscribers that use gmail, it’s extremely important that you set up a DMARC record on your domain to make sure hackers don't use your domain spoof emails and impersonate you.

This part is a blog post on its own, but it’s fairly straightforward. I recommend watching this video on how to set this up:

Almost any email marketing software you use will have tutorials on how to do this, and how to set up your custom domain.

8. Write and send your first newsletter

Once you have all the technical stuff set up, it’s time for what really matters — sending email campaigns!

beehiiv's newsletter writing editor

This part I can’t give you a lot of advice on because I don’t know what your newsletter is about. What I recommend is to subscribe to a bunch of different newsletters and read them. Study the layouts, content, subject lines, and opt-in flows.

Based on my own experience running a newsletter for the past two years, here are some insights I’ve learned:

  • Personable introductions keep subscribers coming back for more emails.
  • The shorter the subject line, the better (experiment with emojis as well).
  • Emails with little to no external links have better deliverability.
  • Early to middle of the week tends to be the best time to send an email.
  • Emails over 98 KB in size will get cut off and not show properly.
  • You’ll get the most amount of unsubscribes when you send an email (don’t worry it’s a great filtration process. You don’t want people on your list who won’t read your emails).
  • Consistency is what wins, not how well you write.

If there’s one bullet point you should take away from the list above it’s the last one — consistency is what wins, not how well you write.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about making a living creating content is that it’s actually really easy. It’s easy in the sense that competition for great content is low.

You might see a bunch of newsletters out there and think to yourself that you missed your chance and that your industry is too saturated. But this is generally all an illusion.

My emails have spelling mistakes, sometimes the emails suck, and there is fear and self-doubt each time I click “publish.”

But what allows me to make a living creating content online is that I just keep doing it even though it scares me sometimes.

There are better writers out there. There are more talented people than me. But 9 times out of 10, people don’t stay consistent because they don’t truly believe they can create a successful content creation career.

If you believe you can, you will. And if you believe you can’t, you won’t.

So just write that newsletter. Send it to those 3 subscribers. And keep showing up. Then, you’ll look back after 2 years and see you somehow created a following. And you’ll also notice so many newsletters (that used to be your competition) that died along the way because they gave up.

So don’t worry what others think, and just create stuff that is authentic to you. If you show up every day, you almost have to try to fail. Success will be inevitable.

9. Monitor performance and analytics

As you send more emails, over time you’ll start to gain an intuition for what your audience cares about. Two years in, and I know what topics to the best, what times are the best to send my newsletter, and what types of subject lines get the best open rates.

But this information doesn’t always translate as a framework others can follow.

You need to create your own intuition and framework for success, and this happens by sending emails and then getting a feedback loop.

This feedback loop comes from looking at your analytics and always having an experimental mindset.

The thing I love about beehiiv is that it has a lot of different analytics tools.

Analytics in beehiiv

I can see exactly where my subscribers are coming from (all the way down to specifically what pages and blog posts on my website). I can also see who clicks on what in the emails, who unsubscribes, who opens, and so much more.

Diving deep into your metrics is what will allow you to iterate over time and optimize your newsletter. Don’t be afraid to a/b test subject lines or even email content formats. Always be testing.

10. Find ways to monetize your newsletter

Paved platform for email sponsorships

As mentioned earlier in this article, the main way people monetize their newsletter is by showing ads. You can use platforms like Paved or even beehiiv’s ad marketplace for this.

But if you want to make the most money from sponsorships, I would recommend reaching out to brands you believe align with your target audience.

I personally have not run an ad in my newsletter (yet). I get tons of requests every day but have respectfully declined because I care a lot about the products I promote. I don’t like promoting things I don’t use myself or don’t understand.

So one of my main ways of monetizing my newsletter is using it to build attention to my client services. Having a newsletter is a way to show my work instead of telling it. For example, I can look at which companies follow my newsletter and see if they want to work with me. And because they already know who I am when I reach out to them, I have a really high success rate with closing clients.

You can also use a newsletter to sell courses or other products you may be selling. And if you don’t have your own product, you can also promote other products through revenue share and affiliate deals.

There are endless ways you can monetize your newsletter. The main thing to be aware of is that a newsletter is a great vehicle to bring attention to products and services. This attention is what is important and will fuel the success of all your adjacent projects.

Conclusion

As you can see, learning how to start a newsletter from scratch has a lot of steps. But if you use a popular email marketing platform to create your newsletter, all that’s left for you to do is write emails people care about.

The tools and technology you use matter a little when creating newsletters. Mainly, it’s important to use a tool that has a great sender reputation and knows how to warm up their IPs for their users. But besides that, what really matters is you find a niche you love and create emails you’d want to open and read.

In this article, I went over all the steps I did to start my newsletter. From having an idea, to mapping out the layout of my emails, to choosing beehiiv as my newsletter platform of choice, to having a growth strategy to sending emails, and keeping a consistent sending frequency to make sure my email list continues to grow.

If you’re serious about creating a media company or making money from writing online, starting a newsletter is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

I hope you learned something from this article and sending you good vibes for your new newsletter! Also, feel free to email me with your newsletter — I’d love to subscribe.

Now go out there and create something you'd want to see out in the world!

Disclosure: Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to Marketer Milk at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. This site is not intended to provide financial advice and is for entertainment only. You can read our affiliate disclosure in our disclaimers.