Transcript
Luis (0:00)
Hey and welcome back to Continuous Profit. This is Luis, half of the Bees res and I'm welcoming you to this incredible start of 2025 in the 10 episode series on where we go all the way from frameworks to how to monetize your content in a very specific way, even how to outrank Google or how to land your dream sponsors. So I think these 10 episodes are going to really help you. If you haven't listened to any of the other ones, go back and they start on January 3rd all the way to January 12th. So super excited to share these with. Enjoy. Hey, I'm Louise.
Louise (0:35)
I'm Louise.
Luis (0:36)
And you're listening to the Content is Profit podcast.
Louise (0:45)
Welcome to part three of the newsletter segment in the Continuous Profit Podcast with the Biz Bros. And or special guest Ethan Brooks.
Luis (0:54)
I have a question, right, Like I think in your thread you, you asked this question like, where should people start with let's say specifically newsletters, right? In the, in this case. But do they do paid newsletters? Should they be free? Right. This is a question that we've had for us. We're like, oh man, okay, there's an email list that's growing. How do we actually start doing this? Is it free for the show? Is it like a paid thing? Like where do we do that? I'm sure like Fonsea has experienced a little bit more on that. It might have a follow up questions to it. But where, where should people start looking into starting this journey?
Ethan Brooks (1:27)
Great question. Yeah. So, and like as is so often the case in business, like the answer is sort of, it depends. But I'm going to give you some concrete stuff. So generally speaking, like I said there, there are like a few components to this, right? Cash flow, audience products. And when you break down that audience product model, you have like your free audience which can be monetized via ads or affiliate deals. You have those low price front end products, then you have your high price back end products. Now the real truth is technically you can start with any one of those and any one of those by themselves can be like a multi million dollar business, right? But you have to ask yourself, if you decide to start with a paid product, how are you going to get distribution for it? And so very often what you see is kind of the most common path is a company will start with a free offering of some kind. And that is that free offering is monetized via the ads and affiliate deals eventually and used to funnel people towards the pay products. So I've seen this play out in a couple of Ways like if, if, if you're thinking strictly about newsletters, let's say you only want to write one newsletter and you don't necessarily want it to be free. Okay, well, you can pull that off if, say, if you have an audience somewhere else. So if you have a podcast or you have a Twitter account or an Instagram account, something where you're already engaging with people and they're understanding, like, your story and the value that you could bring to the table, you can start with a paid newsletter right there. And I know a guy who's. He's a business broker, and so he started a paid newsletter where he shares business listings super early. This thing is doing. It's already doing like $10,000 plus a month in subscription revenue. He just started it earlier this year and he, I mean, his. It was doing like 10k a month out of the gate. And the reason for that, there's two reasons. The first, like I said, he already had distribution through his Twitter account. Right. That's really important. I think it's the one challenge that people run into when they think about this is they think if they just build a paid newsletter and turn it on, it's just going to start making money. And that's. That couldn't be further from the truth. Even if you have an audience, like an existing audience, there are other things you have to get right for business newsletters to really work or for paid newsletters to really work. And the, the main other thing, and this is something that I think he did well and other people would do well to copy, is your. Your paid newsletter, or whatever your paid offering is, has to deliver more value than whatever you're doing for free. And specifically, what I tell people is the shorter the line is between your paid product and how your audience makes money, the more likely you are to be able to pull it off as a business. Right? So for him, he's selling business listings. He's giving people, like people who buy businesses an upfront or early show, an early look at businesses that are for sale. It doesn't matter how much he charges them. If he charges them a thousand dollars a year, like one great business would more than make that up in the first month of owning it, you know? Yeah, so. So of course it worked for him. It worked really well. Other people, I think, struggle when they have, say, like, let's say, you know, let's just say me, I talk about newsletters a lot, so. And I talk about it for free over on Twitter. And yeah, I work for a paid newsletter company. But, like, let's take that out of the equation for a second. If I was to start a paid newsletter tomorrow and, and just write about paid newsletters and how they work, there's a chance that people would buy it. But a lot of my free content is really similar to that. So if people bought it, they'd pretty much be buying it because they like me and they're just trying to support me, which is not a great way to build a business that scales. And you see this all the time with creators of different types. They'll have, like, a really popular YouTube channel or a really popular Instagram account, whatever, newsletter, and then they'll say something like, well, support us on our Patreon, or like, hey, if you like this and you want to buy me a cup of coffee, like, there's a link below. And the problem with that, it can work. But what you're really relying on is whether or not people like you is not about how much value you're driving. And where people can do better is if they figure out, like, what are the features that I can actually offer somebody that is going to help? I mean, the easiest is going to help them make more money. That's not the only thing you can sell. Like, you know, you basically have to sell people things that they really want in their lives. But money is probably the easiest one. And so if you can figure out what parts of your content are most directly related to that, you have a much higher likelihood. And, like, peel it off from whatever your free offering is, you could start out of the gate with paid. And it can work pretty well as long as you have that distribution somewhere.