How Richard Patey Built a Newsletter Empire With Multiple Exits

Building a successful newsletter is incredibly rewarding…But it’s no walk in the park.

That’s why doing it twice is an incredible feat.

But… running up to six newsletters at once? That’s almost unheard of.

Yet, Richard Patey has done it. And, he’s even sold a few of them for some substantial paydays.

We recently sat down with Richard Patey, founder of the Digital Asset Investor newsletter, to discuss how he’s launched, monetized, and sold several newsletters over the years–and why he switched his newsletter empire to beehiiv.

Richard was eager to share his strategy behind running several newsletters simultaneously, his journey as a content creator in different mediums, and why he moved all of his newsletters over to beehiiv to accelerate his growth.

He shared plenty of advice for new creators looking to break into the online world, how to monetize properly, and how seasoned creators can leverage their current newsletter to launch a second one.

If you’re looking to launch your newsletter, or you’re trying to expand your business as a digital creator, then keep reading. With over a decade of experience as a creator, Richard has plenty to share about how to succeed.

Origin Story: 10+ Years in the Content Game

Richard is no rookie in the newsletter game.

He’s a veteran creator with over a decade of experience earning a living from his online ventures. He’s dabbled in everything from SEO to affiliate marketing, blogging, email marketing, sales funnels, and more.

One thing’s for sure. He knows how to create money trees online that provide recurring revenue.

He recalled, “I've been working online for more than ten years. But ten years ago I had a personal website richardpatey.com that I'm bringing back to life now as an SEO play. I had a newsletter there running from like 2012.”

“[I ran it] in the traditional way, where there's an opt-in and lead magnet as an incentive to sign up to my list. Then I would just email out links to new blog posts that I did, the emails were really short.”

“That's the way it was done back then. My focus was on growing content, websites, blogs, ranking in Google, and monetizing mainly through affiliate marketing. So most of my online career has been ranking content sites with SEO, making affiliate commissions, and primarily promoting software products.”

2017: Selling His First $5,000-Per-Month Site

Richard was able to bring in traffic to his sites through SEO-driven content. But, the part he excelled at was turning visitors into dollars. Not only was he able to make a full-time income from a software review site called funnelengine.com; he even managed to sell it for a nice payday.

He shared, “2017 was the first content site exit that I had. I was promoting funnel software called ClickFunnels, as well as SamCart, and a bunch of other ones, including the email software, Drip.”

“I was promoting those as an affiliate, making affiliate commissions, and grew that to $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a month. I sold that through a website brokerage. It's kind of interesting, looking back, because I actually had a really killer lead magnet that was offering free funnel templates for ClickFunnels users.”

“I got like 15,000 emails through a homepage squeeze page back in the day. And I didn't understand the value of that at all. The email list was driving the vast majority of revenue. It was funny at the time because I kept pruning that email list down to under 5,000 subscribers… I didn't want to go into the bigger plan on Drip!”

He shared, “The email—it wasn't a newsletter. The emails that I was sending were all kinds of affiliate offers. That was what was driving revenue. So the newsletter was the business back then. But conceptually, it was still a website. So I sold that business as a website.”

“That was a massively under-leveraged asset,” he admits. “I sold the website—the pages that were ranking in Google. I sold the email list. And, I sold my affiliate accounts (that provided recurring revenue). I massively undersold that. But it was my first exit.”

2020: Paid Newsletter to a Six-Figure Exit

After the sale of his site, Richard became obsessed with the whole process of buying and selling websites. He began looking at them as assets that could be invested in. But, instead of creating another website to promote affiliate offers, he decided to dive head-first into the premium newsletter game.

He shared, “We get to 2020 and I'm quite early to Substack. I launched a newsletter for website investors. So I sold a website. I then started working with the buyer of my website. We went and did some other deals together. We did some other acquisitions together.”

While most paid newsletter creators charge $5 per month for an upgraded version of their free newsletter, Richard positioned his as a premium publication and was able to charge ten times that amount.

“I worked with other investors who were interested in buying websites. So I launched the website investing publication on Substack. It was a paid subscription for $50 a month. I got over one hundred people on that. I then had a free newsletter that I launched—what we consider an editorial newsletter.”

Richard commented that one of the reasons this website investment newsletter did so well was because he was simply the first one there.

“I was the first one in my niche to do this. It was a summary of all the news in the space—what other people were writing on their blogs—and then giving my thoughts. I monetized that through sponsorships and affiliates—website marketplaces and website brokerages.”

“I then sold that newsletter. I built that really quickly, with a similar timeframe to the Milk Road, but with a much smaller six-figure exit. I sold that to a guy called Travis Jamison. So that was in 2020.”

After his second sale, Richard continued to explore the digital creator world by branching out into podcasting and paid communities. However, he always found himself coming back to newsletters because of the different income streams available.

Learn more about Richard’s newsletter empire…