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Ask HN: Do you make money from newsletters?
Hi all - I wondered whether anyone on HN might make a reasonable secondary (or primary) income through newsletters?
Have you managed to distil any principles for getting started, growing your audience, and converting your subscribers?
- WestCoastJustin 12y agoProvide something useful, on a regular basis, then gradually try to sell something. It took me well over 2 years before I made money from it. It takes an extremely long time to build your subscriber base too. I am talking about month over month, you will be sending newsletter blasts to 5, 10, the 30 people, then one month 1000 people will sign up. Takes will power to push through. Just the name of the game. So, start early, and do not expect much. If you are looking for good examples, check out http://www.devopsweekly.com/ http://www.devopsweekly.com/ & http://rubyweekly.com/ http://rubyweekly.com/. Subscribe to them and check out the format. They are both free, and provide high quality curated content, but have "sponsored" (clearly marked) parts. This should give you some inspiration. There is pretty much zero barrier to entry. Register a domain, create a one-page static website on AWS S3/CF, which will host your signup form (and list archive for seo reasons), then use http://mailchimp.com/ http://mailchimp.com/ to run the list. You could have it up and running in an afternoon. Finding high quality curated content is the hard part. I would suggest picking something you know tons about, or something fairly new. Take golang for example, there is tons of information churn, so you want someone in the know, to tell you about interesting things. This is the underlining principle for devopsweekly and rubyweekly. You do not even need to be an expect, just put in the time to track down interesting bits, over the last week. This can and should take many hours. Having said all that, you are probably thinking it is common sense, and it pretty much it. There is no rocket science to it, just put in the work, have high quality content, and it should just work. Patio11 has tons of great info about email marketing. Although, maybe not specific to newsletters, much of it applies. Read on https://www.google.ca/?q=patio11+email+marketing https://www.google.ca/?q=patio11+email+marketing
- neduma 12y agocheckout https://cooperpress.com/ https://cooperpress.com/
- wikwocket 12y agoI'd recommend you look at the story of Hacker Newsletter. A lot of the comments in the discussion threads here on HN have been full of good ideas: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20newsletter&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20newsletter&sort=byPop...