How To Grow A Newsletter Business

ah hey guys Hayden here and in this video I'm going to explain to you my new business what it is I've got this great note here why I picked it how we're growing so quickly our current employees and team structure are finances because we're burning a pretty healthy 40 to 50 000 a month and then the long-term plan as you see in the title I did start a newsletter a completely different business yes emails can be a business that's currently at 37 000 subscribers by the time you watch this that number's probably about 50 we're growing about 600 to a thousand a day hoping to get that above a thousand consistently per day very shortly so it's a really really rare thing for me to start something that's totally new I like to stay in my Lane my wheelhouse that is e-commerce and real estate so it's been years of slowly dissecting new business models looking for something where I can use my current skills and just get a higher leverage point right something a little bit bigger so that is what this business model is and this is my first step into that it's going really really well so we're going to talk about that I'm currently here in the south of France if you hear any noise starting to get loud and busy out here it is F1 weekend in Monaco starting up this weekend so things are getting a little crazy it's beautiful I just got back from Greece having a great time not traveling but eating my way through Europe this summer so it's been disgusting but it's been a blast so I'm having a great time so for any of you guys who follow me here on the channel yes you're gonna notice this I did shave off all my hair because it's overrated it's annoying and this is free to do whatever um yeah I'm really enjoying the travels having a lot of fun in the business so today I've got a lot of good stuff for you we're going to talk about the newsletter a ton of really really good stuff okay 37 000 subscribers a newsletter hosted on beehive and this is something I'm doing with a business partner I would not have started this business at all zero chance without this business partner and I'm very confident saying he probably would not have done it without me because it's it's a yin to your yang I have never really started a business with a partner it's it's usually not something that goes well I've done a little project you know e-commerce stores and made money but never a new business never something like so drastic and such a big change because you know when you have employees we already have multiple full-time people it has to be such a solid partnership and a relationship that is going to last because these employees that are dedicating their lives right now livelihood as well to you and your company like you got to take that very seriously so this business is really cool because I've been on the marketing and like promotion social media side of things for a long time now and my friend my business partner John he has been on the email marketing side of things for many many years and yes email can be a business I want to give you a quick metric here if you have an email list with 10 000 people on average okay kind of doesn't matter on the email the size but you're gonna make about 50 to 75 cents per subscriber per month it can be drastically lower if you don't know what you're doing it can be exponentially higher if you are really really good at monetizing there's a lot of stuff that we have to cover in here but that's that's a range you know 50 cents to a dollar now I'm not going to share what the newsletter is inside of this video I'm sure I will at some point but just like what product I sell and one of my Shopify stores it's it's kind of irrelevant you know there's a lot of overarching things here that can be applied to anything you want to do now getting into the newsletter space over the last six months or so has really been interesting because as I'm trying to learn it's a new industry buying the very few courses that are out there and trying to watch YouTube videos they're all like how to go from zero to ten thousand subscribers in your first year and I'm like that's so slow and 10 000 subscribers is nothing and while that might be enough for somebody to do something full-time like it's it's possible there are just faster ways to scale yes either you have to get more creative be better at organic content and going more viral or this is the route that I'm taking spending more money that's it it's as simple as that so I've got a lot of stuff I wanted to outline this video because it's important to me because I really didn't see any good videos on newsletters there's very few uh big shout out to my first million the podcast guys over there they have some good spin-off stuff talking about newsletters but there's not a lot of like tactical growth I haven't seen one okay if you find one send it to me but I will make sure that that video is just for you so why did we not just me why did we pick this business model myself and my business partner have been you know very stable but not unsusceptible to the overall Market as well as to month-to-month fluctuation so my business has been incredibly stable for a long time but when you know there's some issue with an ad account like for e-commerce your Facebook ad account covet hit my ad account went away the entire business was shut down out of nowhere no warning nothing so stuff can happen where it fluctuates and that's really frustrating so we like the idea of the stability behind the emails right because that email list is there it can't be taken away from you you own it it's there and you can sell to them so as long as you have a relationship with the audience which we're going to get into that's the most important part it's it's just like a YouTube channel almost like it's this is platform dependent right my YouTube channel can get taken down we've seen that happen to many people but an email list cannot and so the stability aspect of this is something I really really liked so for this newsletter we have three primary growth channels okay number one is third party recommendations okay you're gonna be like what the hell is that let's say I'm willing to pay a dollar per subscriber or three dollars whatever it is that's kind of the range that most people stay in fun fact but there's ways to do this where other newsletters or other bloggers or websites or whatever are basically Affiliates for you every person they send your way they're going to get paid for a flat fixed rate amount now that's what we started doing but about two months ago I I realized almost two months ago there are better ways to do this more efficiently okay people call that a co-reg and different words for it or whatever basically you're just paying a fixed amount per subscriber this is really cool because we started using a platform there's a couple available but the primary platform is called spark Loop okay spark Loop allows you there's a bunch of other newsletters on there and they allow you to basically have a one-click upsell page where you promote multiple other newsletters so it's kind of like upselling when somebody subscribes to your newsletter through your Facebook ad or whatever they're gonna hit with a pop-up page hey you might also like this this and this and if they just hit subscribe you're gonna get paid a couple dollars usually per email and so it's very very profitable now what's cool about this model on something like spark group or beehive which is actually a hosting company that we use for our newsletter they just came out with theirs the cool thing about platforms like this versus going directly to a newsletter or a website is you're allowed to set parameters so inside of beehive you set up a rejection sequence where hey everybody who comes from all of these countries or flip it the other way this is what we do we only pay for people from the US or from the US and Canada that's very common to see so if I get 5 000 referrals I might only pay for 2500. well that that cuts my acquisition cost in half right so you can save a lot on that and kind of set your parameters like hey for us they have to be from the US or from Canada and they have to open at least two emails in the first two weeks just some loose parameters most people fall into that but that ensures that you're paying for somebody who's engaged they're not a robot they're from the right location Etc so these are really cool we've actually found it to be a little difficult to grow with some of these platforms and Spark Loop's been our primary one beehive just started both of these are still new they're still growing there's a lot of new people joining but we actually find it difficult to spend the budget that we want and that's really frustrating because for us you know we're we're trying to spend a lot of money to do this and our spend Target is not being met and I understand we're much more aggressive than I mean at least from what I've seen any other newsletter on either of these platforms because we want to spend the most but that's just not something we can do yet so that can only spend so much money and again I have my notes here so pardon if that's unprofessional but I really want to make sure I get through everything here so it's it's a pretty cool thing and there's a lot of different options the second primary way that we grow right now is through paid newsletter promotions so you know you have all these different big ones you might have heard of like you know morning Brew right I think they got a coffee cup logo or something more this is water don't don't get it confused but morning Brew is really interesting because you could go pay them whatever 20 grand 30 grand whatever the price is and get a spot inside of their newsletter and you're going to reach a certain amount of people most newsletters charge a 25 CPM we can get into metrics in a different video but we've paid ten thousand dollars on one transaction seven thousand on another forty five hundred and four thousand dollars so far that is the total accumulation uh for the larger newsletters that we have promoted within so having a free email newsletter promote to our free email newsletter it's really cool because they're selling something but there's nothing for sale right it's it's free so we have a very high conversion rate we have actually found this to be more expensive than any of our other acquisition channels but if you look at the data inside of beehive those are our most engaged subscribers so from an acquisition perspective it's it's high effort because we have to constantly communicate set up these campaigns and analyze the results and it is the most expensive but those are the most engaged readers those people really really like our stuff and in my opinion that's because we're picking specific newsletters that are not exactly like ours but they're like one layer removed you know so for an example if you know there's two people that talk about coffee and like the health benefits around it we might you know advertise with like a General Health Foods space you know something like that where it's a little bit outside because usually the direct competitor won't want to work with you so that's one thing that's been really really good for us the third is organic and there's a couple different subsets under here we did a lot of Google SEO when we first started that's slowed down and now it's just a small drip of you know three to five subscribers a day but it's something we also have Twitter now we pay an expert to do this on our Twitter page we spend about 23.50 a month right now I think is the number about 2500 bucks to have the Twitter completely handled and that includes you know multiple posts per day creating all these free assets doing giveaways stuff like that that's it's like a long-term Outlook because we want to grow that as its own asset right and have followers there have an Engaged audience but we've actually seen even in the first month is a you know still very expensive but starting to become a more reasonable cost per acquisition right so paying you know whether it's six dollars seven dollars per you know subscriber from that but actually starting to see not only the growth of the followers but actually some of that transferring over to subscribers has been great so that's on the organic side we also have you know seven to ten small Affiliates if you will like direct Micro influencers those are the people that I was reaching out to when we were first starting a lot of little YouTubers and tick talkers that are in the industry and trying to get them to promote and get paid a flat rate per subscriber again I didn't know about spark Loop and sparkly but still really new it's really only popped up in the last four to six months but we didn't find it till two months ago and so I think I think that'll be really big for General newsletter growth but this is just like the less efficient version of that so those people still do you know some promotions but it's it's negligible it's like 100 people a month so there's that side of it and I want to mention all of what I just mentioned all of the you know different growth uh formulas and strategies and whatever else is completely irrelevant doesn't matter one bit if your product is trash and I subscribe to a lot of newsletters I'm deep in this space now and we have full-time employees that are doing the same thing so I'm very on point on like trying to learn this and understand it and seeing what people are doing in all different niches right most newsletters suck that's just the truth just like how most businesses aren't great most whatever aren't great right there's only a small subset that are great and so people either promote too much and not offer enough value it feels salesy whatever it is you have to create a good product and myself and my business partner decided early on that the customer our customer to our company is the reader it's not somebody who pays us you know two grand to advertise it's not the affiliate thing that we'll probably eventually promote it's not somebody who bought you know eventually have different customers we might create a product that people can purchase but our customer our primary point of attention is the reader that's it and that's not somebody who's paying us any money and that's very different for both of us from our previous businesses right we both still run other companies that's where we make our money that's how this business is funded so it's just it's very different but what's cool is looking through that lens it allows us to do everything based on the filter of does this serve the reader in a greater way and if the answer is no then that decision does not move forward very very area likely and so because of that you know we've turned down multiple advertisers and it's just you want to craft it so the reader is the most important thing okay we've got a lot of stuff to cover here if you're enjoying the video so far give a little thumbs up or let me know appreciate you let's talk let's talk about the finances this is always an interesting point I I'm so curious I want to hear about other newsletters and stuff but can't find it so I'll start just this is by the way exactly what I did in the e-commerce industry six seven years ago nobody was talking about it great happy to be the person so maybe we'll do that here I'm really enjoying this this industry we are currently spending about forty thousand dollars a month our Target's 50. Okay the reason that that other 10 000 is not being spent is because spark Loop is not they're not there yet okay and Tyler from beehive my business partner has gotten to know him met him a couple times um he's the owner of beehive we asked him when they first launched their platform they're like hey come on over here do do that promotion with us instead of spark loop I asked him Point Blank we were like hey are we going to be able to spend 30 000 a month on your platform and he said said probably not not right now so it's like there has to be enough people and enough traffic promoting you to actually be able to spend that much spark Loop's getting us close and I think it is growing but it's one of those things where we're just not there yet so we're not meeting our spending budget and I just want to make it clear people say this newsletter we started about five months ago people say 40 000 a month we've been spending forty thousand like for less than two months like this is our new like where we're at after identifying spark Loop primarily before that it wasn't much so our total cost per acquisition like is is not a lot right we've done a lot of organic stuff so uh we're at a really good point and I can do a separate video on finances like our crossover graph point of where we're going to start breaking even but we're focused on growth and focused on the reader so a primary plan of ours was just to spend more money than anybody else good plan I guess right if you're just trying to get eyeballs and trying to get readers be willing to pay more per customer now how do you do that and not be foolish about it okay because if you have a ton of money to start a business that can actually be a bad thing because it makes you foolish and you're just going to spend money in ways that are totally wasteful so we're trying to be very conscious of that and I think my business partner more so than I uh is is super like hey man like is this the most efficient thing so it's great because I'm I'm like what he describes all gas no breaks I want to go go I want to scale I don't care if we spend more money and I don't want to do it inefficiently right but I I'm happy to spend more if it means better growth further growth faster so that's that's just the approach that I've take I'm aggressive so it's it's really interesting because we do spend more money than other people we do pay a higher payout per subscriber than most other newsletters and that strategy has worked it has worked incredibly well so I think we're getting approved correct however the back end of that how do you make sense of doing that right there's a couple way the ways that newsletters primarily monetize you have the whole spark Loop model now where people like just they just share it's like a monetizing loop like okay you run your Facebook ads and there's that pop-up page you make a couple bucks maybe you offset your front-end acquisition that's a very poor monetization model most people sell ad space to companies on their newsletter that's that's base level 101. that's yeah you can make some money doing that great there's a company called milk Road the milk Road um they're you know crypto newsletter they went zero to I think 250 000 subscribers in 11 months in under a year and they sold for I think about 4.5 million cash and a little bit of equity forward they had no product no other monetizing they were just selling 200 Grand a month of AD spaces that's it that is a terrible terrible monetizing format okay so you have your ad space you have Affiliates you might have some like back-end promotion you know co-regs set up whatever but building a product is really where you make the money so I think where we will be able to make sense and we've already done all the numbers we're happy with our current cost per acquisition I'm actually willing to pay more but we are very happy because we understand how to monetize this better and I think that's what sets us apart you know from 95 percent of people in the newsletter industry maybe 99. so that's that's one of those things um and again uh just to talk a little more about the finance side our cap right now is about 50 000 a month that's what we're willing to spend that'll get us within the next couple months to kind of that crossover Breakeven point where we're no longer burning cash and I think at that point we'll just kind of re-engage and put more money into it so we do continue losing money on paper for growth so that's one of those things for us we're more than willing to do it if we're seeing that the model is being proved correct and we already are things are going really well I'm gonna get into that we have a few great team members so as promised to talk about the employee structure the team structure I want to make sure my stuff's still recording here all right we're good we have a couple great people two specifically that I think will be with us forever that I that I hope will be with us forever one of them is a full-time researcher and writer she is currently doing both of those roles okay So eventually I'd like to split that out so that she has a researcher underneath her someone that she can manage delegate some work to eventually maybe a team of writers who knows what that role will grow into currently we are not doing daily emails so the workload is still full time especially with doing the research but it's not one of those things where we need a team underneath her but eventually if that's needed we're fine to do that the second person who I also hope will be with us for the the future is a sales guy and this person is primarily doing cold Outreach via email to advertisers to get them to purchase ad space inside of our newsletter that's usually something you can start doing about the 20 000 subscriber Point people start being interested it starts being worth the effort so that's one of those things where we're now starting to sell ad space um and I'll talk about that here in a moment we actually did just close two deals the first one for fifteen hundred and thirty dollars which was like a multiple Edition thing and then another one that was a secondary placement for Less so starting to close that we have a seven percent response rate from cold emails if you know anything about emails that's a little over double where it should be so really really good to see that um you know I love to see it the other two people I have a VA building two spreadsheets for us her job on a daily basis is to add a certain amount of advertisers to a list for the sales guy that number currently is 30. so every day she has to go and identify through a research process following an sop that I created and I manage her to go find all these advertisers that would fit you know kind of within our audience within our Niche and you know find two points of contact so the primary is going to be an email and then add some sort of secondary as well as some information on the company and go put that into a spreadsheet which then every single day the sales guy attacks and just does the Outreach so that's one of those things where that will probably grow into a larger role where we need more advertisers being reached out to but for right now going really well so that's perfect the fourth and final person is not really an employee it's more of a third party Service Company a guy that we know a referral from a friend who does Twitter he does it at a very high level does really well um and so he's handling all of our Twitter ghost writing doing a bunch of stuff posting you know five to eight times a day and it's going well so love to see that uh that's a that's it that's our team right now it's kind of four people if you will you know three internal and then that service and that's a lean team I mean I I truly believe we could operate with hundreds of thousands of subscribers doing a few hundred thousand a month and building our own product or products with just that team I really think that team alone can crush it so you don't need much you know like yeah there's some overhead on that team sales guys commission based yeah we got a full-time employee yeah we got the VA that's it's V8 it's not that much and the Twitter service costs a little bit but it's like it's it's not crazy for for that quality of a team so yeah there's that just so you guys know like I'll probably share what this newsletter is once we're like 100 to 200 000 Subs hope that's cool like I just want to get a little more established and really get these systems in place first and then I'm happy to I would want to talk with my business partner first and have a chat with John let me know in the comments down below if you'd want me to have him on this as well but I want to make sure we're on the same page about what we share what we talk about and uh maybe we do it together that'd be super fun because he's not much of like a personal brand guy and this thing has nothing to do with my personal brand so I think that's actually really cool because some of the businesses I've built have been off of that like for e-commerce we have a really successful eCommerce coaching company we teach a lot of people how to do that do it really well I have a free course you can check it out I'll leave it linked below but yeah so and just a side note on this to touch on it more because I'm this is like the part I'm really stoked about and I wrote all this down because this is just important to me my business partner and I have both built our own companies right that currently operate that currently that's that's our full-time thing right and so these companies are in totally different Industries and we've learned so much we've gotten to hire and fire so many people buying courses learning General business this company feels like it's starting off on the right foot because we don't have to like go back and untangle the mess you know I've had like fix so many broken things inside my business I've had to I've put the wrong people in place there's just so much I've learned over six seven years that I feel like we can just you know cut through all of that and just be on a great place with a strong Foundation right away like setting up core values and proper systems and procedures right away from day one I mean that took years and years and years to even know that was a thing you know so just it allows us to start on a right foot I think it's um I think it's just it's it's awesome and so I'm already seeing the fruits of that like it's just growing so fast so I do look forward to the challenges and untangling the messes that do come with this business I'm sure there's going to be a lot of crap that we have to deal with and I look forward to it because it's an opportunity for us to learn and specifically for me in in my part of the business and my duties to be able to learn more about that and get better and improve and lead a team and hopefully give them a great place to work long term so those are things for me that are important to me here and I mean I really look forward to building this business so we can avoid a lot of BS other than that I mean make sure you follow the day-to-day over on Instagram my Instagram account I post a lot of stuff there again currently traveling through Europe so having a lot of fun here just enjoying but yeah subscribe stick around I'll probably be talking a lot more about newsletters and do some updates maybe once a month or whatever on how this is growing because it is growing really quickly there's a lot of fun stuff we're doing here so yeah I hope you enjoyed this video it's definitely a different style but I think it is something first of all that I would be searching for and currently M searching Forum that is exactly why I started the e-commerce videos so long ago I could not get a clear answer so I hope this was that for you guys like whatever platform you want to use there's a couple good ones you know convertkit beehive whatever like we can go into all these different things yeah there just there wasn't a lot that I I saw there on growth and spend and monetizing so hope I hit on some of those things let me know what else you'd like me to discuss happy to do it just leave in the comment section down below and I'll see you in next week's video

Channel: Hayden Bowles

Views: 43,110

Keywords: newsletter, how to start a newsletter, how to scale a newsletter, how to grow a newsletter, newsletter business, newsletter side hustle, beehiiv, myfirstmillion, my first million podcast, convert kit

Id: FPT9Xvr70-Y

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023