Case Study: $50,000 Per Year with Newsletters

First of all, I’ve got to tell you that the $50,000 a year number is crazy super conservative. This gal, Judy, is earning more than that, but I wanted to make it realistic looking for even the newest marketer.

Okay, how does Judy (not her real name) pull in well over $50,000 a year with a monthly newsletter while spending only about 10 hours on it per month?

She promotes the newsletter to every person who joins her list when they join. This means when she’s giving away a lead magnet to get someone on her list, buy a product from her, or buy one of her products through an affiliate, and they are immediately hit with the newsletter offer.

Judy is adamant about promoting this newsletter as her flagship product for four reasons.

First, when someone subscribes to the newsletter, they are three times as likely to open and read her other, non-newsletter emails. Judy thinks this is because of name recognition and her trust through the newsletter.

Second, they are more likely to buy other products from her, both her and affiliate products, because they trust her.

Third, most of her coaching clients come to her from the newsletter. These coaching clients pay her $1,000 a month for two one-hour sessions. If you’re doing the math, that’s $500 an hour.

Fourth, Judy noticed it’s about four times easier to get her newsletter subscribers to sign up for SMS messages, and we know how profitable those can be, right? That means direct offers to a cell phone, snap buying decisions, and instant money.

Okay, now you know why she works so hard to promote her newsletter, which by the way, she only charges $20 a month for. Yes, the recurring revenue from the newsletter is good, but the newsletter also enables her to have all of these other income streams.

Now then, having a newsletter forces Judy to create content every single month. She says that before the newsletter, she would put off creating content. She dives in each month and creates an awesome newsletter for her many subscribers.

She then uses the newsletter to promote new products and discover what products she should create.

Promoting products inside the newsletter is easy. She’ll teach step by step how to do something, and along the way, she recommends tools or even a done-for-you solution.

And she asks her readers for feedback on her newsletter. She’s watching to see which articles get a lot of traction. She can use this feedback to determine if a popular article means she should create a product around that topic with a little more investigation.

She also writes articles as test balloons to see what kind of feedback she gets before creating a product. She says this has saved her perhaps a dozen times in the last few years from making products that almost certainly would have flopped.

Finally, repurposes her newsletter content into new products. Sometimes it’s as easy as bundling some old issues together and selling those to non-subscribers along with a trial subscription of her newsletter. Other times she’s created books from her newsletters and guest blog posts, too.

She partners with other marketers to offer their best products at drastic discounts to her newsletter subscribers ONLY. And four times a year, she allows a marketer to guest post in her newsletter with a big spread in the middle of the magazine, calling it a bonus section. Of course, she charges these marketers for the privilege of writing this bonus section, and they are allowed to market a product of their own in this section.

As you can see, Judy’s newsletter is the very heart of her business. It helps her sell far more of her other products, sell more affiliate products, and decide which products to create next, and it creates a monthly residual income she can count on no matter what else happens that month.