Monetize Your Newsletter with these Five Tactics

Whether you are a newsletter creator, publisher, writer, or anything in between, you started this journey to follow a passion and share that interest with the world. With a lot of hard work and a little luck, perhaps you’ve succeeded in building a following.

You may be saying, “This is great, but how do I make a living from this thing I’ve built?”

If this sounds familiar, I’ve got good news, and you should continue reading.

Advertising

Selling advertising to brands seeking to reach consumers is the most common monetization model on the internet. Though it sounds simple, this model requires legwork from the publisher to source brand partners, negotiate contracts, manage invoicing, and more.

Want to learn more about how to sell advertising as a publisher? Check out this comprehensive article.

However, the benefits you can reap are sustainable and potentially quite lucrative. Here’s what you need to know about the different ads you may want to sell.

Native Ads

Native ads are content created in the same style as the larger newsletter but created for promotional value.

Typically the brand buying the ad crafts this content, and it’s common for collaboration between brands and publishers to ensure that the tone and style of the native content align with the larger publication.

“Presented by…”

Sponsorship of a “Presented by [brand]” is a popular placement often bundled with a native advertising spot for a cohesive brand experience. In some cases, this may be the only ad placement or separate from other ads.

The most significant benefit of this ad format is that readers can’t miss it when they open the email, regardless of device size.

This ad is primarily a brand placement (vs. a performance placement) as most users won’t click on it. Instead, the impression of seeing it may influence their behavior down the road.

Banners

These ads are similar to the display ads you see across the web and are the easiest for consumers to spot. Generally, the performance of this ad format will be lower than native ads and is typically the least desirable for both brands and creators.

However, these placements are the easiest for a brand to create and for a publisher to insert. Publishers' risk by using these ads is that readers may not respond positively to such overt marketing.

Premium Subscriptions

Another popular way to monetize a newsletter is by offering subscribers the premium subscription tiers in return for a fee. This tactic can be a great option if you or your brand are against adding advertisements to your publication.

The key to successfully running a premium subscription program is to create high-quality content that your readers are willing to pay for. While it may sound challenging, there are various ways to structure premium content. These include:

• Behind-the-scenes content

• Early access to your existing content

• Premium-only content / or even an exclusive newsletter

• Exclusive access to merchandise

• Priority status for live + digital events

• And more

The options are expansive and limited only by the imagination and what users will pay for.

This can be a compelling option for publications with comparatively small audiences, as this tactic doesn’t necessarily rely on the scale or the size of an email list.

Affiliate Links

There are countless products and services out there willing to pay a fee to have traffic referred to them. These companies set up affiliate programs where creators can obtain a unique link that rewards them for leads or purchases that You send to them.

This monetization can also provide new content to write about in reviews, product breakdowns, and more. We recommend that you disclose to your audience that the link is a paid referral link so that they know that the writing may be biased, but this doesn't stop readers from finding the information useful.

This form of advertising can be a win-win-win for publishers, advertisers, and readers; publishers make an income, brands can easily track the ROI of their advertising investment, and readers discover something new and valuable.

It's essential to ensure an affiliate opportunity meets several criteria. The representation made about the product or service must be accurate so that readers can trust what you're saying. Second, products should align with your audience So that the content doesn't feel out of place.

Tip Jar

Perhaps the oldest method of monetizing creative work, a tip jar, can be a lucrative way for readers to show their appreciation. However, the question becomes, in a digital context, how can this work with small amounts of currency without processing fees eating up the tip itself?

Enter cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency promises low-or-no-fee person-to-person value transfer in a way that is anonymous and requires little infrastructure, similar to cash.

This isn't going to turn into a deep dive into how crypto works or how to Work with a specific cryptocurrency. Instead, assuming a basic familiarity with coins like Ethereum, Bitcoin, or a handful of others, it's possible to set up a digital tip jar that allows users to send small amounts of cryptocurrency as a token of appreciation for your work.

During the pandemic, many people became more comfortable using QR codes. QR codes offer a convenient way to share the complicated strings of letters and numbers that make up cryptocurrency wallet IDs.

Using a QR code maker like this one, creating a QR code that a reader’s crypto wallet can scan as a destination to send funds becomes straightforward.

Once generated, a QR code image can be dropped into a newsletter with an Explicit call to action or simply passively inserted into the footer.

Ready to get started? Try this tutorial for step-by-step instructions:

Audience Data

Disclaimer: This section is significantly more advanced than the previous methods

The data that you can collect on your readers can be some of your most valuable monetization sources.

Whether you have a web component to your publication or simply collect subscriptions on a landing page and your publication lives in your users’ inboxes, there are ample opportunities to provide value to brands.

Based on your publication's topic and subject matter, there are no doubt brands eager to reach your readers outside of email on other platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more.

The following methods will describe how you can monetize your Audience data outside of the newsletter itself.

Requirements

• Tracking setup on your publication to record visitors and sign-up conversions

• An ads manager account with the platform you want to run ads on

Run ads for brands

Brands are constantly searching for ways to reach relevant audiences across social media and the wider web.

One of the prime challenges they face is how to target these audiences correctly. This is where your publication comes in. If you run a crypto newsletter, for example, your users are interested in crypto. This makes your audience attractive to brands interested in reaching crypto users.

Setting up ad accounts with mainstream social networks and Google makes it possible to create a unique and compelling offering to brands. They will be willing to pay you to run ads from your account to your audience with their ads and offers.

This fulfills their desire to reach relevant users, and because the ad is coming from a trusted source, this audience may be more likely to engage with the ad.

Partner with brands to run their own ads

This tactic is similar to the first one, but instead of your account running the ads, you can partner with a brand to give them access to your audience and allow them to run ads themselves.

This approach may be desirable for brands with more sophisticated marketing teams or who have an agency managing their paid media buying.

Regardless of who’s managing the brands' ads, this approach requires some extra legwork up front, but once set up requires less work on your part.

Excited to leverage your newsletter community and monetize your content?
It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 subscribers or 100,000 — with beehiiv’s monetization tools, you can make the most of your newsletter!

The best part?
You can start building your email list for free on beehiiv!