Running a paid newsletter is all the rage. You can turn on paid subscriptions on Kit or Substack by connecting them to your Stripe account, pressing a button, and asking people to subscribe. A paid newsletter looks crazy attractive. Substack even slapped a calculator on the homepage at one point so aspiring newsletter owners could salivate over potential monthly profits. All you have to do is write your newsletter and forget about all that marketing. What creator wouldn’t love that type of business model? The paid newsletter option is lucrative if you already have a massive and or committed audience. This model worked for Bob Dunning, a former American journo turned big Substack writer. Authors like Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie have also succeeded with this model. However, all three had audiences before starting their paid newsletters. The paid newsletter model is proven for specific niches like investing, business≤ and tech. Think the Morning Brew or Bankless. That’s because readers in those niches have a good chunk of disposable income. I’m not a massive fan of paid newsletters for every creator. Running a paid newsletter can feel like pouring water into a bucket with holes. You’re constantly pouring in new subscribers while others leak out through churn. The churn rate of a typical paid newsletter subscriber is about three months. So unless you’re onboarding more paid subs than you lose every week, you’ll hit an income ceiling. You’re also committing to a content hamster wheel. With a newsletter as the product, you must deliver on time to paying subs. If you enjoy writing a regular newsletter, that’s not an issue, but some creators hate the idea of productizing something for $5–10 a month. Creating a paid newsletter means keeping your best content for paying subs. But gatewalling top-tier content slows down the organic growth rate of a newsletter. That, in turn, can slow down monetization unless you’re a whizz with ads. Granted, Substack addresses this problem somewhat by enabling newsletter owners to send free and paid newsletters to their lists. I experimented with a paid newsletter for a few months. It was somewhat profitable, but I hardly earned quit my job money. Plus, my newsletter grows organically via the Kit creator network, so I don’t like gating my content as it slows my flywheel down. I turned off paid subs and focused on promoting my offers and landing sponsors. I’ll probably try a paid newsletter in another niche in 2025. In short: try the paid model and see if it works for your niche. Write on, Bryan Collins PS If you like reading these daily emails, you’ll love my private, no-cost Telegram channel. I share behind-the-scenes content about how I’m growing my content business. My goal is to help you add $3–5k to your business in 2025. Join here |
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You don’t need to write multi-thousand-word prompts to get a usable output from ChatGPT. Most creators overcomplicate writing AI prompts. They write paragraphs of instructions and still get mediocre outputs. A good ChatGPT prompt has four parts, and you can cover them in a few sentences. First, describe the Persona. This is where you tell the AI tool who it is. “You’re a master storyteller” or “You’re Steve Jobs.” This puts GPT in the right mindset. Next comes the Task. Be specific about what...
Writing and creating online has never been easier. I’m a big tools guy. Here are 15 tools any creator can use to get started: 1) SEMRush or AHREFS—for keyword research 2) ChatGPT or Claude—for content ideation 3) Canva—for creating images quickly and easily 4) Grammarly—as an AI-powered writing assistant. 5) Hemingway App—for improving the readability of a piece of writing 6) Ulysses or IA Writer—for writing and formatting articles for the web 7) Workflowy—for creating outlines. Tutorial here...
Hey Reader, I’m working on something for you and want to make sure it’s exactly what you need. Can you take 10 seconds to answer this quick poll? 👇 Which product would you be most interested in? Newsletter Monetization Playbook – How to get sponsors, ads, and recurring revenue from your email list. Content Repurposing and Strategy System – A step-by-step system to turn one piece of content into multiple high-performing formats across platforms. Advanced LinkedIn for B2B Leads – A proven...