A few more monetization ideas occurred to me while I was out walking the dog this morning. Like the others, I don’t know if any of these are good (in fact I think some are distinctly bad).
But no wrong answers at this point:
Product Collabs: Rambler branded cigars, bourbon, etc – partnering with cool brands in the area to do limited runs
Swag: Could do a line of hoodies, T-shirts, drinkware, etc.
Coffee Table Books: This one would take a while, but after a couple years of publishing recipes from local restaurants, or interviews with local founders, you could bind them all together into a nice book
“Best of” lists: Sort of like the Inc. 5000 (which is a racket). These ranking things PRINT money, but are kind of lame
Of course, I don’t think we’re going to have to get too cute with the monetization. After today, I’m. more convinced than ever that there’s a viable ad market for a high end business + lifestyle local newsletter.
I was at Whole Foods today and picked up every magazine I could get my hands on that had the words, “Austin” or “Texas” on the cover. Luxe. Texas Highways. Austin Home. And of course… Chip and Joanna’s Magnolia.
They’re packed with ads. Architects. Realtors. Builders. Furniture makers. Even super niche things, like bespoke safe-makers, or local plant nurseries. It looks like tourism boards of cities even shell out for ad space.
It would take a week to comb through one issue for all the prospective advertisers and story prospects.
Every issue has several competitors in it, page after page. Which has me thinking, I may be able to compensate for a smaller audience by limiting each issue to just one ad spot for each industry.
So you pay more, but you’re THE realtor ad, or THE architect ad. And we can offer click data too, so that’s worth something.
Look at me already saying “we.” Blegh.
Another cool thing — at the back of many of these magazines there’s something called a Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation that tells exactly what the audience is, and even breaks down how much of it is paid subscribers vs other methods of circulation.
Apparently, this has something to do with the USPS. They have something called a Periodical Permit (which somehow affects mailing rates) and in order to maintain it, publications have to fill this thing out.
Magnolia has one. It says their average copies of each issue over the last 12 months have been 1.65 million.
I have a theory that in order to run a successful local publication, all you need to do is get to know a handful of interesting movers and shakers in a city.
The people who are already planning events and building communities.
If you find a few of them that you really get along with, they can introduce you to everyone you’ll need to know, and keep a fresh supply of stories coming your way.
I think to find them I would search social media for hashtags related to your city. I’d look for…
Okay, so we know there are essentially three ways to monetize a media business:
Free publications (monetized via ads and affiliate deals)
Low priced paid offerings
High priced paid offerings
The thing that makes me nervous about Rambler is that the path to monetizing is a little less clear than it would be for a typical tech/business newsletter.
The mechanics are the same. But early in the process, I’m wondering if I could ever get a big enough audience, or a valuable enough audience to make significant money from this project.
After all, there has to be a reason no one’s really cracked local media yet.
Actually… I take that back. I’m not sure if someone’s cracked it. I shouldn’t assume they haven’t.
Anyways, off the top of my head, I have a few ideas…
Ads: If I target a higher-income audience, ads may still be viable. Local attorneys, realtors, architects, co-working spaces, conferences, etc. I should look through the other Austin lifestyle magazines to see who advertises.
Affiliate: Similar to the way Newsette highlights 4 Amazon products per week, there will be opporunities to add affiliate product revenue. Should test different programs to see what works best.
Paid Drips: An interesting concept I’ve seen someone talk about on Twitter. Basically you set up drip campaigns to fire to all new subscribers. Then charge advertisers to be in the drip somehow (either in an email, or the dedicated subject of an email). Dunno, but worth thinking about.
Job Listings: Similar to ads. This might be worth it if it’s relatively hands-off.
Local Listings: Similar to an Angie’s List – round up recommendations for certain services, and drive lead-gen to them in exchange for a fee. This feels like kind of a volume play though, and I’m not sure I’m interested in that.
Referrals: Similar to the above, maybe just a more bespoke version. Build partnerships with a few key service providers in town – marketing agencies, executive search, realtors, etc. Connect readers 1-1. Not sure if all those industries can even pay referral fees, but since I’d be talking to so many people, it feels like there’s some opportunity to connect them.
Events: Could think up some cool events, organize, and sell tickets. That’d be fun.
Selling Fine Furniture: Let’s say you can build a desk that sells for $20-$30k. Ten of those per year could be a pretty great income.
Newsletter Advisory: If my readers are mostly business owners, some may be interested in consulting for their brands’ own newsletter.
Course: Let’s say I find a reliable way to get ads up to like $250k per year. Rather than doing that in multiple cities, I could license the playbook. Longer term, but that’s probably how this gets big. Similar to Hormozie’s gym play. But he had a ton of reps in launching gyms. I’d need to find some way to prove to myself the model really works reliably.
Mystery Box: I have this suspicion that every new type of media model that really succeeds, succeeds because they find a completely novel way to provide value. I’m not sure what this is yet, but I don’t think the key is to just replicate the normal media model on a local level. Something about the economics of that feel shaky to me. Instead, I think there’s something slightly hidden, like the way Craig Fuller has found a way to monetize outdoor sport magazines via insurance products.
X-Factor: Merely by publishing on a regular basis, you open yourself up to unforsee-able opportunities.
I’m heading into my last week at Hampton, and for the last few months, I’ve avoided thinking too hard about what’s next.
I was never good at the “crossover” technique of starting one thing during my spare time while keeping a full-time job.
When I have a job, all of my time goes to that. All my focus too.
In some ways, that’s part of the reason I decided to leave in the first place. I still love the company and the people. But I just realized that I’ll never do my own thing as long as I have a job. And I want to do my own thing.
I just haven’t known what.
Two ideas have tugged at me though.
The first was a general newsletter for D2C founders. The idea was to write case studies of D2C brands going from 6- to 8-figures, and then monetize via affiliate partnerships with a handful of agencies I like. Maybe even with Hampton.
I know how to do that type of writing, and I know the business model can work. That’s exactly how YouShouldTalkTo makes money. There was just one problem: I have zero background or clout in the D2C world. I also don’t have much passion for it.
I like to see D2C founders win. But when I sat down to research a few brands I just didn’t feel compelled to keep digging.
So to me, that idea would have been easy to monetize, but hard to write. And somehow, that felt like a mistake. There’s never any guarantee a business works out, so why waste your time building one just for the money? It should be something you like to do.
Which brings me to my second idea…
Recently, I’ve been getting into woodworking, and part of me thought that after leaving my job, I’d start making and selling furniture.
I’ve never done either of those things, so to get an edge, and learn faster, I thought I’d start a local newsletter all about craftsmen here in Austin. I’d interview them. Highlight their work. And in the process, build both a network of knowledgable teachers, and an audience eager to buy handmade stuff.
For a long time, these two ideas jockeyed back and forth in my mind.
The D2C concept seemed the most likely to work. But the woodworking thing felt like it had more soul.
I thought of doing both – D2C writing as my “day job,” and then woodworking for fun. But I knew I had to pick one. Part of the reason for leaving my job was to be less of a workaholic, and starting two different publications didn’t seem in line with that.
Then there were all these other interests I had – HoldCo’s, and regenerative farming, cooking, and competitive shooting, hunting, travel, media companies, advertising, and local restaurants.
I want time for all of those.
This has been the constant battle of my life – hopping from place to place, thing to thing. Never spending long enough for any of them to take root.
Today, I feel like it all crystalized.
Rambler will be an upscale business & lifestyle newsletter for adventurous founders and tech employees living in Texas.
It’ll be focused on the things I’m most interested in – like adventure travel, interior design, business, and living well.
Building it will force me to put roots down here in Texas. It’ll also be interesting because it’s a new type of media challenge I haven’t worked on yet. It gives me a cool reason to keep learning from other writers and media founders too.
I’m pretty sure I can make it a viable business. Maybe not a multi-million dollar behemoth like Morning Brew.
But then, does it need to be?
One of the reasons people try to make so much money is because they believe it will help them lead an interesting and fulfilling life. And it seems to me that if you put yourself in the middle of all the cool stuff going on in your town, and write about it – you pretty much guarantee the same thing, regardless of the money.
In a lot of ways, I think local media is the most interesting opportunity young entrepreneurs are overlooking right now. I’m gonna help unlock the model, while building a cool brand in this cool state, and getting to know other cool founders.
I found a new framework I love for thinking about speed and how it relates to work.
In this video, Alex Hormozi is talking about overcoming procrastination and says that one of his company’s core values is, “speed is king.” You’d be excused for rolling your eyes – a lot of companies say stuff like that to justify a frantic culture and inability to prioritize. It gets old.
But he takes it in a different direction.
“It’s not what a lot of people think,” he says. “It’s not about being impatient. It’s not about trying to get a hundred things done. It’s about knowing how to get things done that matter…”
Here’s framework I love: He goes on to define power as the gap between thoughts becoming reality.
So an all-powerful, omnipotent being would think things into reality immediately, and at the other end of the spectrum you’d have someone who was completely powerless – unable to turn a thought into reality no matter how much time they were given.
We are typically somewhere in between, and (ideally) should be working our way left on that line.
I love this because it seems both simple and universally true. Across all times, and in all situations, the person with the most power is the one who is able to transform their ideas into reality the fastest. And over the course of your career, a way to measure progress or mastery in your craft is to assess whether you’re moving left on this scale.
I also like it because it puts useful guardrails on the old adage of “move fast and break things.”
“Speed isn’t doing things fast,” Hormozi says. “It’s basically just not being distracted by other shit that doesn’t matter. It’s being able to prioritize.”
Which brings me to the last reason I love this framework – it lends so much more weight to the importance of prioritizing, avoiding multi-tasking, and saying “no” to more.
Multi-Tasking Drains Your Power
I’ve been studying manufacturing recently. It’s a field that values precise thinking, and out of necessity, they’ve gotten good at analyzing systems, looking for bottlenecks, and removing them – something more knowledge-work companies should learn from.
One of the key thinkers in the space was a man named Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt who came up with something called The Theory of Constraints.
One of the keys to that theory is the idea that multi-tasking is bad. He liked to show this using the example below:
Imagine you have 3 projects that need to get done, and you can do them either sequentially, or you can multi-task between them. Depending on your choice, your timeline will look like one of these.
On its own, this graphic does a great job showing two things:
Multi-tasking significantly delays any individual project’s completion, which is a problem because the work isn’t useful until it’s done.
Because you incur a slight switching cost every time you change focus, all three projects ultimately take longer to finish overall.
But when we layer on Hormozi’s idea-to-reality principle, we see that what’s really going on here is that multi-tasking is tangibly decreasing your power. It’s moving your further to the right on the idea-reality line.
A lot of people talk about the importance of focus, or of being able to say no. But they I still say yes to too much. Focus feels like a nice-to-have. The first thing on the chopping block when things get tough.
But power? No one in their right mind would knowingly undermine their own power, or the power of the organization they work for.
This applies to both big-picture projects, and the way you spend your time day-to-day, hour-to-hour.
Something interesting happened this week at Hampton that’s updated the way I think about organic newsletter growth in the early days of a publication.
First, some background:
Currently, our strategy for growing the newsletter is 100% organic. Both of our co-founders have large social media followings, so there’s a lot of juice to squeeze there before needing to go paid. We’re also still learning a lot about our audience and what they want – figuring out the content.
So organic is the way.
The official plan basically riffs on Justin Welsh’s system. We…
Lean primarily on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hacker News
Post 1-3 times per day, occasionally linking back to our blog
Do pre- and post-newsletter calls for signups (like this and this)
And generally try to share cool stuff people actually like
The “plan” has been to gradually build the reach of those audiences, so that each time we link to our site, we drive more and more traffic, and grow the list faster.
Then, this happened…
This off-the-cuff Tweet from Sam sent thousands of clicks to our site, many of whom signed up for the newsletter. All-told, we hit ~70% of our growth goal for August off this tweet alone.
I know what you’re thinking.
If you know Sam, you’re probably thinking, “Of course he can pull this weight. He’s famous.” And to some extent you’d be right. A decent percent of our monthly traffic still comes from him Tweeting about Hampton or retweeting our posts.
But the conversion on this was much higher than normal.
Hence, my updated idea…
Before this, I would have said that the most important part of early organic growth was consistency. You plan your content schedule, and you stick to it, tweaking and getting better as you go.
Now, I think differently.
The most impactful part of early organic growth are these black swan events. And the consistency is only important to the extent that it forces you to take shots on goal, increasing the odds you land one of these.
It is probably inaccurate to say that these black swans drive more growth than consistent posting. Over a long enough time span, I bet consistency wins.
But early on, they definitely account for your biggest growth swings. And more importantly, they offer some kind of signal about what your audience actually craves.
So what about all the other Tweets?
Do you keep sending them? When one post out-performs weeks worth of content, it’s easy to question the purpose of it all.
But I learned something there too. Because a day or two after this crazy viral hit, Hampton’s account sent a tweet that got just a handful of likes (low even for us).
But multiple readers re-shared it with messages like this, and it reminded me of something important:
The purpose of your content is not to “perform” or “drive traffic.” Not really.
Its purpose is to move people.
It’s easy to forget, or get caught up in the numbers. But the reality is that the real measure of worthwhile storytelling is the ability to get one idea out to someone where and when they need it.
I wasn’t looking for a course. At least, I didn’t think I was. But I bought one anyways (for $80 no less) after seeing an offer appear in my inbox. And it’s got me thinking about what it really takes to monetize an email list.
I think we have a tendency to over-complicate the sales process.
That’s mostly because, when we talk about building a course or other paid media, we’re talking about building a media business – something designed to pay all your bills, and to keep you and others fed for years to come.
And that indeed does take a lot.
But when it comes to the moment of the sale, I think all you need is…
A product that solves a specific pain point at a reasonable price
A clear, simple email offering it for sale
A decent reputation
At least, when I reflect on what got me to spend $80 out of the blue, those are all that come to mind.
Let me break them down here real quick.
Solve a Specific Pain Point at a Reasonable Price
I wasn’t looking for a course. But for months, a little voice in the back of my head has been saying, “You really should learn more about AI.”
I’ve taken some steps to work on this – like reading more AI newsletters, or testing a handful of tools. But really, I feel like the space has grown so fast, I don’t know where to start anymore.
Then, poof.
This morning, in my inbox, a magic email offering to give me an overview of a few popular tools. And an offer for 60% off.
A Clear, Simple Email
I offer, for your review, a look at the exact sales email below:
There’s no fancy graphics. No long sales page. I’m not even entirely sure who sent me this email (I just know the brand name of the newsletter – more on this soon).
Funny enough, I’m not even really interested in the initial offer of saving two hours a day. I like how specific that is – it got me to read the email. But I like my schedule just fine now. I’m not interested in changing it.
I also didn’t really read it that much.
I saw, “ChatGPT,” and “MidJourney,” (two big, recognizable names, and tools I’ve been wanting to understand better), and that was enough for me to click.
Clicking the link takes you straight to a Stripe page.
There is a sales page, but I didn’t see it, proving that in at least some cases, it’s not necessary.
At $199, this would be in the “no man’s land” of pricing – too high to be a front-end product, but too low to be a back-end.
But with the coupon code, the price comes down to ~$80 (comfortably inside impulse-buy territory) and that was enough.
But why would I be willing to spend even that much? That’s where I think the final piece of the puzzle comes in…
Decent Reputation
You don’t have to be famous.
People just need to know your name, and that you either:
Create great work, or…
Hang with people who are known for creating great work
I mentioned that I’m not really sure who sent me this email. It’s signed from someone named Jordan but I don’t know who that is.
All I know is that this newsletter is from YPNAR, and that brand is associated with Greg Eisenberg.
This is embarrassing, because Greg is well-known in startup/solopreneuer circles, but to be honest, I don’t know much about him or his work. But I know he associates with people like Sam Parr, Sahil Bloom, and others, and I respect their work.
And in this case, at this price, for this pain point, that was enough.
Wrapping Up
I think there’s a lot of people like my on YPNAR’s list, and on yours. Going through this was a good reminder that selling doesn’t have to be so complex.
You’ll have to excuse me if this issue comes across informal – I’m writing it at the very end of a vacation.
I’ve been off work the last two weeks, mostly tramping through the woods of New England with my dog. But the last two days have been a big party with the family. So I’m sneaking this in under the wire.
When I go back to work tomorrow, it’ll be primarily to focus on growing Hampton’s blog and newsletter. Both are new (just two months old), and up to this point we’ve been scrappy – our strategy hasn’t gone much further than:
Publish cool stuff on the blog
Promote it on social to draw readers to the site
Use a (cleverly-worded) pop-up to grab emails
Rinse and repeat
It’s a lot of work to publish great articles, and before we press the gas on traffic, I want to be pretty sure that the site is set up to turn as many visitors as possible into email subscribers.
So the question I sat down to answer this week was…
Which calls to action should you definitely have in place on your newsletter’s website before going hard on promotion/growth?
To find out, I texted my buddy Matt McGarry. If you don’t know Matt yet, he runs a newsletter growth agency called Growletter, and is one of the best in the biz.
We worked together at The Hustle, and he’s since gone on to help grow a bunch of the most successful newsletter companies out there.
I’ll get to his thoughts in a sec, but while I was waiting for him to respond, I decided to visit some of his client’s sites just to see how they’re doing things.
Matt’s pretty focused on Twitter, Meta, and TikTok ads. So I don’t think he touches much when it comes to site design.
But his speciality is growing newsletters from 100k to 1m+ subscribers, so I figured that anyone on his list has their act together enough to build a 6- to 7-figure audience.
That’s good enough for me.
I spent an hour digging into The Hustle, 1440, and Chartr, and can boil the learnings down to 4 areas:
The Five Basic Email Captures Common To Newsletter Sites
A Universal Framework For Newsletter C2A’s
The Importance Of Customized Interactions
Inspiration And Unique Design Elements
I’ll go through each quickly, then share Matt’s insights too.
1. The Five Basic Email Captures Common To Newsletter Sites
Spend any time comparing major newsletter sites side-by-side, and one of the first things you notice is that a lot of them look… like… really similar.
After a few years in the space, I chalk this similarity up to two things:
It’s a small world: There still aren’t that many people who specialize in designing, publishing, or growing newsletters. The ones who do all talk. So you see the fingerprints of the same few people across sites
This design works
Great. That’s gonna save us time. Each of these companies is testing, tweaking, and trying to optimize conversions. So whatever they have in common should be a safe baseline for our purpose.
I opened an incognito tab so I could browse all three sites like a new reader, and found that while the details vary, they seem to have these five email-captures in common:
Above The Fold
Footer
Nav Bar
In-Content
Exit Intent
We’ll zip through an example of each real quick…
1. Above The Fold
“Above the fold,” is an old newspaper term used to describe any content on the top-half of the front page of a newspaper (a.k.a. the part people actually see before picking the newspaper up).
We use it in websites too, to talk about anything you see without scrolling when you hit a landing page.
As you can see in the image above, while The Hustle has their daily and featured stories listed lower down on the homepage, the space above the fold is mostly focused on capturing email addresses.
That same is true for other newsletters too. For example, Chartr and 1440…
It’s interesting to see that Chartr and 1440 don’t curate stories to their homepage or have a nav bar.
Makes sense. Both can be distracting, and these pages are designed to capture as many email addresses as possible.
The Hustle’s homepage used to be the same way. I’d be interested to know what led to the change, and how it’s performing.
An archived version of The Hustle’s homepage
Regardless, the point is clear — when people land on your site, the first thing you want to do is show off the newsletter and give them a way to sign up (more on exactly how in the Universal C2A Framework in section No. 2).
2. Footer
This one’s simple — at the bottom of each site, there’s another email capture.
3. Nav Bar
I almost missed this when I did my first inspection of the sites, but each has a link to join their newsletter somewhere in the nav bar.
As I mentioned above, Chartr and 1440 don’t show their navigation on the homepage. But if you dig to pages deeper on the site, the C2A is there.
If you’re a little OCD (like me), and wondering why this is third on the list when it’s positioned the highest up on the website, here’s why: If two of three case studies can afford to leave these C2A’s off their homepage, I’m assuming they’re less effective than the things I mentioned earlier.
4. In-Content
When you click to read an individual story, each newsletter has a clear email capture visible somewhere on the page.
For example, The Hustle uses these forms embedded directly in the text (one always about 20% into a story, the other at the very end). If a story is short, they skip the first one, and simply use the second at the end:
Chartr is similar. Their stories are all quite short, and begin & end with embedded forms like this:
But 1440 is different — they use a sticky subscribe form that’s locked to the bottom of the screen.
I like this idea, especially for longer stories, since it makes it easy to subscribe at any time as you read an article. You never know which sentence is going to connect with someone and make them think, “Wow, where has this been all my life?”
But when that happens, you want the subscribe form to be close by.
5. Exit Intent
Finally, the pop-up. Not just any pop-up though. An exit-intent pop-up (meaning that it triggers when someone moves their cursor out of the website tab, as though they’re attempting to navigate somewhere else).
That’s it.
Each of the newsletters has other things individual to them (we’ll get into some in sections 3 and 4).
But when it comes to major similarities, and 5 good email captures to start with, those are the five.
2. A Universal Framework For Newsletter C2A’s
Okay, so we know which email capture forms we’re going to start with. But how do we design them to be most effective?
Well, obviously, that’d take some testing (each site/audience is different). But if you scroll back up through the examples above, you’ll see that most newsletter signup forms contain these four things:
Promise: What will you get if you sign up?
Cost: How much does it cost to sign up?
Audience: How big is our audience (aka social proof)?
Time: How long will it take you to read (aka how much effort will you need to invest in order to get the thing we promised)
Promise. Cost. Audience. Time. PCAT for short (or cat pee, if you’re seven).
Now obviously, you would want to adapt these depending on the type of newsletter you’re running. If you write 5,000 word deep dives, you probably won’t jump on the “5-minute” bandwagon.
The trick is to realize what each of these is actually doing so you can adapt for yourself:
Promise: Gets the reader thinking about what’s in it for them
Cost: Lower the barrier to entry by showing how little is needed
Audience: Build trust by showing other people like/trust you
Time: Show how your newsletter saves people time (even if it takes more than five minutes to read)
3. The Importance Of Customized Interactions
Here, I want to pause briefly to look closer at a couple of email captures we’ve already discussed — namely, The Hustle’s…
In-Content Forms
Exit Intent Pop-up
The Hustle is a particularly interesting case study because it’s owned by HubSpot, so they’ve got a ton of resources to work with when it comes to page design.
Not only do they have way more manpower and money to test/optimize/design, but HubSpot is the marketing platform used by thousands of other companies – so they have internal data from users on what’s working best to grab attention and capture leads.
And one thing they’re doing that the other two aren’t doing quite as much, is customizing the copy on email capture forms to match the interaction the reader is having at the moment they see the forms.
It’s subtle, but I noticed that this felt different as a reader, and I think (if done well) it’s got to have an impact on your conversion rates.
1. In-Content Forms
As I mentioned, The Hustle serves two different in-content forms. One embedded about 20% into the piece looks like this:
Somehow it feels a little more engaging than a generic email capture. Because they’re acknowledging what I’m doing (reading/enjoying the piece)
2. Exit Intent Pop-Up
The same goes for the exit pop-up. Look at the copy, and how they’re almost having a live conversation with me as I try to exit the site.
It seems like a little thing.
I think the reason this stood out to me is because I know that my default personality would be to NOT do this. I’m not typically the person who digs into the settings to customize things perfectly to my needs.
It’s tempting to just throw up a basic pop-up, and focus more on driving traffic.
But I bet little customizations like this make a difference, and after experiencing these as a reader, I’m going to look for opportunities to do this kind of thing on our site (and probably… ugh… my personal site too.)
It will be very interesting to see what generative AI offers in this regard soon.
4. Inspiration And Unique Design Elements
The last thing I’ll point out before we close with Matt’s advice is something I can only call “style points”.
Each of these newsletters does cool little things to encourage readers to sign up.
For example, a lot of newsletter companies have this mobile phone aesthetic on their homepage, but The Hustle takes it a step further – this is actually a custom slide-show that gets updated every day with headlines, and photos from the last few newsletters.
Think about what that does for conversion when you land on this page and see images, stories, or headlines you recognize from social media chatter the last few days.
Notice how the subject lines are starred too – a subtle hint that you will love this newsletter if you sign up
The Hustle also just does a good job of using motion in general to bring the homepage alive.
This content section looks like something out of The Daily Prophet.
1440 uses motion too. They have this cool little ticker on the homepage that shows how many people have opened the newsletter so far that day.
When it comes to audience social proof, this is one of the cooler implementations I’ve seen so far (though I have no idea if it’s real, or just a nicely designed ticker that counts random numbers over two million).
Their URL is also “join1440.com” — a subtle call to action, which is cool
Finally, Chartr has gone ahead and updated the title tag on their homepage so that their organic Google result has a “Subscribe” call to action in it.
Helps readers know they found the right result, and primes them to sign up.
5. Matt’s Advice
Okay, so we’ve seen a bunch of common email capture forms the big dogs are using. We’ve dissected how they structure their calls to action, and the role that customization and “style points” can play.
Then Matt came back and gave me two pieces of guidance I found really helpful:
Today, we’re lookin’ at Peter Zeihan to see what he can teach us about being a high-priced creator/consultant.
If you don’t know Zeihan, he’s a geopolitical analyst who’s gotten famous over the last few years for his opinions on China, the US, and the future of globalization (namely, that there isn’t going to be one).
But my fascination with him has less to do with his public opinions, and more to do with how he spends his time.
He seems like the paragon of a paid thinker…
Author of several books and a near-daily newsletter
Lives in the mountains of Colorado, close (but not too close) to Denver
Long hikes every day to think and record Youtube thoughts
Travels often to give paid speeches and seminars to big companies
Likely doing 7-figures in annual revenue without much of a team
Doing well enough to donate 100% of book proceeds to charity
Funny
Basically, when I grow up, I wanna be like Peter.
So this week, I spent a few hours digging into his business to uncover any key learnings. We’re going to look at three:
Business Model
Ideas > Optimization
Chosen Relevance
1. Peter Zeihan’s Business Model
Before we dive in, remember that all media companies essentially make money in one of three ways: Free products (which are monetized via ads and affiliate deals), front-end products, and back-end products.
I’ve been dissecting all sorts of creator-led media brands in public and private for years now, and have yet to find one that doesn’t fit this model. Peter is no exception (although he is using some interesting products we don’t see often in the typical newsletter space). Let’s dive in…
Free Products
The core of Peter’s media footprint includes two key properties: his newsletter, and his Youtube channel. Both are free, but that doesn’t mean they don’t earn money:
His Youtube channel is monetized, and averages ~1.5m+ views per week. At an estimated $5 CPM, that’d be ~$7.5k per week from Youtube alone
Both the newsletter and Youtube include plenty of calls to action selling his other products (below)
C2A on his Youtube videosC2A in the Newsletter to buy the books
One smart thing: In videos, lectures, podcast interviews, and writing, he continually emphasizes the fact that both his newsletter and Youtube videos are, and will-always-remain, free. That’s a good way to help growth.
Traditionally, front-end products are paid products that run roughly $50-$100 (cheap enough to be impulse buys).
Technically, the only thing Zeihan offers in that regard are his books.
However, he also does something I haven’t seen a solo-creator do before: He sells high-ticket webinar recordings. He’s got more than half a dozen webinars priced $650-$750/ea., and covering topics from inflation to the Ukraine War’s impact on energy, food, and materials industries.
I’m going to lump these in as front-end products for two reasons:
His remaining products are likely much, much more expensive, so relatively speaking, these are still his “low barrier to entry” offerings
The corporate clients these are designed to appeal to are less price sensitive than typical consumers (more on this soon). So again, in relative terms, these are “low priced”.
Back-End
Finally, on top of these, Peter also does:
Speaking: He’s represented by several speaker bureaus, and in this interview with Joe Rogan said that he did 179 seminars last year. Hard to know if those are all in-person or a mix or live + online, but either way, it’s a lot.
Executive Briefs: I’m not quite sure what these are, but I’d imagine they’re high-ticket, highly specialized research projects undertaken for execs at a specific company. Maybe something like this PDF he wrote back in his days in private intelligence.
Consulting: Always a mystery.
2. Ideas > Optimization
I don’t know much for certain about how much money Peter makes each year. But I do know…
From this podcast that he’s looking forward to retiring soon.
From this newsletter (posted Friday) that he’s doing well enough to donate 100% book proceeds to charity.
So he’s doing well. And yet, anyone who’s spent time focused on growing an audience would look at the website and see at once that it’s kind of stitched together – not really optimized for conversion.
There are plenty of email capture forms. But they don’t really flow, the pages are just a little chaotic, and there are clear gaps in the funnel.
For example, there’s no nav button for the webinars. The only way to find them is by clicking through random newsletter, or Youtube video archives. Maybe they’re not a priority. Or maybe it was just overlooked.
Chaos (but pushing the newsletter hard, which is good)
And yet, my conservative estimates place his annual revenue in the seven-figure zone when you factor in speaking and consulting fees.
So what’s the point?
The point is that even if you don’t optimize every last detail of your site, you can generate more than enough money by getting the big things right:
Speaking of monetization, that brings us to the next interesting lesson I feel Peter’s work has to offer us all as professionally curious people…
3. Chosen Relevance
I’ve mentioned a few times now that a lot of his time is spent speaking to, consulting with, and writing for executives. Specifically, executives in the agricultural, industrial, and energy sectors.
a.k.a. People with deep pockets.
These are big industries where a lot is at stake. And there’s an important lesson there: Zeihan has purposefully found a way to make his passion (geopolitics) relevant to big companies who can pay him lots of money to hear how his research can make/save them even more money.
Let that sink in for a second.
He purposefully figured out the link between what he was interested in, and what big companies are willing to pay to learn, then used that as the foundation for a (likely) multi-million dollar publishing and consulting empire.
I don’t know about you, but this has me thinking questions like…
What big industries would care a lot about topics I like researching?
What are the specific angles they would care about?
How much is on the line for them? What’s it worth?
What would they need or want from me? (in terms of webinar topics, executive briefs, etc.)
To take things one step further, he’s even found ways to have a positive impact on some of these major industries by showing them where there’s incentive for them to go greener, or more local.
Now I’ve known about Justin Welsh for a long time, but it wasn’t until I saw this clip on Youtube the other week that I realized just how big his media empire is (starts at 4:04)…
There’s nothing I like more than when I find someone who’s making way more money than I expected, and doing it on their own terms.
So I dug in deeper, listening to hours and hours of podcast interviews, reading other deep dives, and buying his course to see what I could learn from the way he’s grown.
In 2023, Justin Welsh will do ~$1.7m from his solo creator business…
About 76% of that comes from sales of his courses ($150/ea.)
The rest is a mix of consulting, ads, and affiliate/subscription sales
All of this is powered by his LinkedIn, Twitter, and newsletter
2. Superpowers
After reviewing a lot of his work, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s got two main superpowers:
Systems Thinking: The thing that stood out most to me is that Justin has an incredibly dialed-in system for writing and distributing content (more on this in a bit). He’s a total mercenary here, with systems designed to let him produce consistently, even when he doesn’t feel inspired. This is huge.
He also comes across as a bit dispassionate, observing what works and cutting what doesn’t, without getting caught up in the mystique of being a “creator.”
Playing A Long Game: This is the part that’s hardest to internalize, but he’s willing to spend a year or more building up an audience somewhere before ever selling to them. For anyone starting this journey, this is torture to hear. But it’s also a common thread you see with a lot of successful creators.
3. Background
The first thing you need to know is that Justin isn’t a writer. Or at least, he wasn’t…
He was a sales guy. But after more than a decade in high-stress high-growth startups led to drinking, an overwhelming panic attack, and a visit from EMT’s, he started planning his escape.
The background in sales is important for two reasons.
First, it should give you hope if you don’t consider yourself a writer either. This trade is learnable, for the most part. It’s not as precious as some would lead you to believe. Justin’s an example of just how much is possible, even without a “writer” background.
Second, you’ll see how it informs his approach to the business (I believe this is one of his unique advantages).
At any rate, about seven months before he left his job as a sales exec, he started publishing to LinkedIn with the idea of eventually landing consulting gigs to replace his job.
It worked. And as his audience grew, people started asking him more and more about how he was doing that. Today, most of his work actually focuses on helping people grow their own audiences.
4. Business Model
Remember, the main business model for these kinds of media companies is simple: They’re monetized via free, front-end, and back-end products. (More on each here)
It would be tempting to focus exclusively on the part of his business that does most of the revenue – the courses.
But if you do that, you’d miss the bigger picture. So instead, let’s go through the bullseye model in-full.
Free Products
While Justin has built an audience across LinkedIn, Twitter, and a newsletter, he currently only monetizes ads on the newsletter:
Look at how simple this sales page is.
He runs up to two ad spots, both at $3k/issue. And each ad is text-only, up to two sentences.
What that means is that the ad business is set up in such a way that it doesn’t take much of his time. Advertisers likely buy, submit their ad text to him async, and he schedules/runs without much else.
According to the interview he did with Noah Kagan, of the $1.7m he’ll do in revenue this year, ~$30k will come from affiliate deals, and ~$120k will come from the ad system above.
If you’re doing the mental math, $6k/wk times 52 weeks is a lot more than $120k. I chalk the difference up to one of a few things:
That estimate could be old, based on lower pricing (the price was $2k until very recently)
He may have <100% fill rates. Many newsletters do, so plan accordingly
Ads may not be a priority for him (with 75%+ of revenue coming via courses)
Of these, I lean most toward No. 3.
Front-End Products
As a quick reminder, front-end products are primarily defined by their price. They can be one-time payment (like courses) or subscriptions, but typically hover in the $50-$100 range. Low enough to be impulse buys.
This is where the bulk of his business sits, and it’s comprised of two major revenue streams:
Courses: He sells 2 courses on Gumroad for $150/ea.
Subscriptions: He runs a paid newsletter ($9/mo) where he shares the social media templates he’s using to drive traffic.
These are both comfortably in “front-end” territory. And between the two, he’ll do ~$1.4m this year (the vast majority of which is represented by course sales).
The paid subscription is an up-sell for members of his course, and I want to take a second to point out how smart this is.
One of the most important and often overlooked aspects of paid subscriptions is that they give you recurring revenue.
To understand just how great this is, let’s pretend you’re selling a course, and like Justin, you’re able to sell $1m worth of seats this year.
That’s impressive. But do you know what you need to do next year?
That’s right – sell $1m worth of seats all over again. More if you want the biz to grow.
Now, pretend you make $1m selling a subscription product, and 50% of those people renew for a second year. You start year two with $500k in the bank, and even if your ability to sell stays capped at $1m in sales per year, your overall revenue continues to grow.
More money for the same work. That’s the magic of paid subscriptions.
His model is a little different. I believe the paid subscription is billed monthly, which changes some of the math.
But the big idea here is that it’s smart as a course creator to experiment with value-added subscriptions and recurring revenue.
The other thing he did well… when designing the paid subscription was to focus on different rather than more.
Newsletter writers often struggle with this when deciding when/how to take their newsletter paid.
The option many default to is to offer more. (E.g., Free subscribers get one email a week, but paid members get two or more.)
That’s a mistake.
Generally speaking, unless you’re sharing verrry valuable information that’s directly tied to your reader’s income, they just aren’t that motivated to get more of your emails. For the most part, they barely have time to read the ones you already send.
So a more strategy will always limit your income to only your most dedicated readers.
But if you sell a subscription that offers something different from the free newsletter (ideally something valuable, that helps them make money, save money, or save time) it becomes harder to resist.
Social media templates to grow your solo-preneur business is a great example.
Back-End Products
Similar to front-end products, back-end products can be one-off or subscription-based products that are primarily characterized by their price (typically $500 and up).
In media, when you talk about back-end products, most people think about high-ticket subscriptions. But I tend to lump consulting and coaching into the back end as well, because…
It’s a higher-ticket, higher-touch service
It can be sold using free or front-end products
According to his interview with Noah, Justin does ~$150k in coaching each year.
He doesn’t talk a lot about what kind of coaching that is. It’s not clearly available on his site. Nonetheless, it’s a good example of how building a large audience brings valuable opportunities. Even the side income is a great salary on its own.
5. Growth
I’m actually not going to spend too much time writing about how Justin grows for two reasons…
First, many others have already done a great job deconstructing his process. Here are a few of my favorites:
This episode of Bootstrapped Stories is probably the best single interview I found – and includes detailed thoughts on his approach to social media, content creation, networking and more.
But more importantly, the topic of how he grows is the main thing Justin himself writes about.
It’s the topic of both his current courses, and he’s also broken it down in detail for free many, many times. (Like here)
I took his Content Operating System course. It’s great. Specifically for anyone who knows what their niche is, but isn’t sure what they should do day-to-day to grow their audience on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If I were to break down my personal takeaways, they would be:
Promotion > Production: After writing an article, he finds about a half-dozen different ways to package and share insights from the piece (e.g., contrarian take, listicle, etc.) then uses a tool like Hypefury to pre-write and pre-schedule that content on his social channels over 6-12 weeks. I like this ratio of promoting much more than you publish.
Regular Growth C2A’s: Every week, he promotes his newsletter once the day before the email goes out (“sign up to get XYZ tomorrow”) and once the day after. I’ve already begun testing this at Hampton and it’s extremely effective, sometimes driving more clicks and signups than even our most popular and helpful Twitter threads. That’s a big deal because the threads take way longer to write.
This is a business: An aspect of Justin’s work that I think often goes over-looked is that he’s not here to “have fun.” Sure, he’s having fun. But his business functions like a machine – the newsletter is short and to-the-point, it’s written on a schedule, promoted in the same ways each week, and those posts publish consistently, at the same times. In a world where many people romanticize being a “creator”, I find this refreshing.
There is, of course, a lot more to get from his course. But these were the things that had the biggest impact on me.
Kajabi does most of the heavy lifting, powering his site, courses, and email list. The rest is mostly tools for pre-scheduling the afore-mentioned social media content and analytics.
One thing I’d love to know is more about how he uses his analytics suite. If you go back through enough of his work, it’s pretty clear that he tests things pretty systematically. I’m guessing that’s a holdover from his days leading sales teams.
It’d be interesting to learn more about how he tests, and what he tracks.
One cool thing to note is that he’s also become an affiliate for several of the companies whose tools he relies on to run his business.
But that’s enough to go on a few killer vacations a year. All for passively recommending tools he already uses.
It makes me think about how all of us have some similar opportunity. No matter what you do, chances are there’s something the people around you know you for. Something they ask you about.
You don’t have to be a business owner to benefit from this.
Even if you’re an employee, and you write about the work you do at your job. It wouldn’t take much to put up a simple tools page with some affiliate links.
Actually seems like a great first-step for people trying to build a personal following around a topic they already know well. Having the affiliate links up would allow you to monetize without having to build an entire course, and can free you to focus on publishing.
The income would likely be small at first, but its growth would be a good indicator of the trust you’re building with your audience, and more important, a signal that people are willing to buy things from your recommendation. Once you have that, you can build and launch products much more confidently.
