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TAKE THE FIRST STEP TO PASSIVE INCOME
I built a tool to help you earn additional (passive) income streams.
Hey pal 👋🏼
A couple years ago, I started hearing about people building newsletter businesses. Seeing those three words together was confusing and interesting.
My consulting business at the time had a newsletter for years. At one point, we had nearly 20,000 subscribers. But I only treated it like a channel to teach, inspire, and pepper our audience with updates & offers.
Operating the newsletter like a business channel? Never heard of it.
Then I started taking notice of several solopreneurs and full-timers-with-side-hustles who claimed to be building their newsletter business. I followed casually, never thinking much of it. Until I started looking into the numbers…
Revenue averaged from several publicly available sources
Lightning struck for me last August. I had the idea to launch Profit Ladder. I would build it on top of a newsletter.
But what I thought I’d do with this newsletter since launch, continues to evolve. From a tool I use to write and share valuable content, to the foundational linchpin of my business.
In today’s post, I’m showing you how I’m building and growing my newsletter into the hub of my online creator business.
If you’re building a media business with a newsletter (or considering it), I hope it gives you some actionable ideas to test out.
You’ll learn:
The six monetized spokes (channels) of my free newsletter hub
Projected revenue per channel (targeting $100k by the EOY)
Experiments I’m running to build & iterate these channels
Over the next two Sunday deep dives, we’re going to break down the six ways I’m monetizing this newsletter.
Part One (today)
Premium subscriptions
Newsletter referrals
Sponsorships
Part Two (Sunday, Mar 10)
Exclusive (high-ticket) products
Commitment (mid-ticket) products
Impulse (low-ticket) products
For each channel, I’ll also provide revenue projections.
Keep in mind, one pivotal factor of your monetizable newsletter is subscriber count. I’m currently at 303 subscribers, with the goal of 5,000 by EOY. So today’s projections will be based on that growth timeline, assuming some degree of churn.
One note: My newsletter runs on beehiiv. Most of the same monetization capabilities exist on ConvertKit, Ghost, and, Substack (I think).
Here goes!
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