Newsletter monetization paths — Itay Paz // Morning Dough

Quotes

• “First of all, theres a possibility that a newsletter doesnt really make any money, at least not directly. It could just be a brand strategy, you give value and the brand just grows.” - Itay

• “The first way you can monetize a newsletter is when the company itself has products and services. It could be a physical product or a digital product, online course, consulting, whatever it is as long as it belongs to the company.” - Itay

• “The creator of a podcast has something that theyre trying to sell whether its a product or service and the newsletter is an engagement tool that links to whatever those products and services are, youre counting revenue based on stuff that people buy.” - Ben

• “The second option which is actually a play of numbers is what we call a premium model. For this, you give something for free and you upsell them. The newsletter is free and then you can create a paid, premium newsletter and it offers additional features like a community online.” - Itay

• “For the premium model, you need to have a big scope. If you have 50,000 subscribers and you have a few hundred people paying you a hundred dollar per month, then its viable. If you have 500 subscribers, then having ten people pay you hundred dollars, you work hard for ten people, it doesnt really make sense. This model works only when the volume is higher.” - Itay

• “The third option is to go into paid advertising inside the newsletter. You can put banners, logos, insertions off an actual ad. So companies pay you to place their ad in the newsletter. Its pretty simple and straightforward.” - Itay

• “So you got a couple of different paths here. One, you are selling products and services. Two, you are selling premium content, and three you are monetizing through sponsorships.” - Ben

• “The next thing is similar to paid advertising where a banner has paid sponsor content. Companies know the value of sharing their content. If the content is there and its valuable and people are happy then it increases not only the CTR but conversions as well. So its called paid sponsor content.” - Itay

• “The next one is affiliate marketing where you promote other peoples products and you get commissions if the people you send traffic to actually convert and generate money. So you get money out of people spending money in other places.” - Itay

• “Its very easy, you go register, you get a link, and it can place it in the newsletter as your own internal advertising in the newsletter. Its not prepaid but if someone clicks on the banner and buys, youll get commission.” - Itay

• “One of the most known one is dedicated, paid, promotional emails. So instead of having a sponsor inside the newsletter they can actually pay you to send dedicated email just on them. It could be content, it could be advertising, but just on them to the list.” - Itay

• “Youre selling access to your audience but instead of putting it in the newsletter, youre carving out the ad and distributing it as the only piece of content which brings more focus to your sponsors, potentially negatively because your subscribers wont know why that promotion got to them.” - Ben

• “It all depends on the specific vertical market of what youre doing. If youre doing something that offers price points in products and services that are involving tens and hundred thousands of dollars, its a completely different thing if the industry is by a B2B that has tens and thousands of dollars per sale. Its a different ball game. It depends on the market and what it is.” - Itay

• “If its a smaller list but has high quality and has money revolving, I would go with paid advertising inside the newsletter. I would use paid sponsor content inside. I would use affiliate marketing but for valuable products.” - Itay

• “I would go with the resources that you already have. You may need to invest in some things like writing but lets say getting an audience? I would use every podcast that you have and say, hey guys, if you havent subscribed, just go to this URL and subscribe to our newsletter and keep on sending people more. You dont need to do anything other than getting people to subscribe and send them the newsletter.” - Itay

• “In that sense, you do it the leanest possible right now and as you grow the list, and you have the power to actually feedback because thats where it will actually generate more people and feedback the podcast and advertisers can go not only to the podcast, they have another value. They can advertise here, you can charge more money. Altogether it gives you the possibility to gain more money from both.” - Itay

• “The one that actually published its number is the morning brew. It was sold for 17 million dollars a couple of months ago and they had 3 million subscribers. They were generating about 8 million dollars a year from the newsletter for 4 million subscribers.” - Itay

• “Im saying if were gonna be spending 5,000 dollars a year, we are gonna grow our expenses so whats the potential windfall. What Im hearing from you is using the comp of the morning brew, you can get somewhere around 2 to 4 dollars per subscriber, per year, if youre successful and so you can work backward from that.” - Ben

• “So, 150,000 dollars a year makes me feel better about 60,000 dollars a year so now youre looking at a 90,000 dollar gross profit. Its worth doing the newsletter, its worth hiring the people to go out there and its a little bit of a leap of faith assuming youre gonna get to that point of monetization.” - Ben

• “Thats where we have to be good at not only making sure that you have the resources to be able to build and scale but you also need to be able to evaluate whether your podcast is working and move quickly.” - Ben