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Find Your Tribe with a Niche Newsletter
How To Choose a Money-Making Niche (And Other Helpful Tips)
Nicola Vaughan
June 21st, 2023
A newsletter is an effective way to grow your audience and generate consistent income. If you’re wondering how to make money from a newsletter, one of the key things to consider is what you’re going to write about: your niche.
Without a niche, you’re unlikely to truly engage an audience and build a loyal community. Take inspiration from successful creators like Matt Gray from The Soulful Entrepreneur who has tens of thousands of subscribers on the beehiiv platform, or the daily crypto newsletter provider, Milk Road, who scaled to over 250,000 subscribers in under 12 months.
These are just a couple of examples of triumphant newsletters that got their niche right to reach their victory.
So how can you go about finding a niche for your email newsletter? Keep reading to get the low-down on finding your tribe and making your newsletter a roaring success.
Email fell out of fashion for a while because everyone’s inbox was flooded with spam. Today, email newsletters offer a more personal way to connect and share more content with an audience than social media.
Not convinced? Here are the answers to a few common FAQs:
Absolutely! Here’s why:
Powerful spam filters keep out most of the riff-raff, and email is once again a powerful marketing tool.
People want ad-free content–and they’ll pay for it. Most websites are flooded with popup ads that obscure content and diminish the user experience.
They certainly can be–if you have the right strategy in place.
To make money with newsletters, you’ll need:
A large audience
A monetization strategy
A niche topic
Value: a solution, education, inspiration, or entertainment
A commitment to consistently generating quality content
Here are the most common ways to monetize a newsletter:
Paid subscriptions can average $2-20/month per subscriber
Advertising (sponsorships): an effective and reliable way to make money from a newsletter before you grow a following; just avoid making your newsletter a wall of ads.
Affiliate marketing (promoting other people’s products, where you earn a commission)
Part of a funnel that leads the audience to a product or service purchase
Paid subscriptions, affiliate marketing, and sponsorships can work together in the same newsletter. However, never mix sponsorships with paid subscriptions. People are paying not to see ads on your content.
Newsletters can be profitable. If you’re just starting, a reasonable expectation is to make $2-10 per subscriber per month. Once you’ve scaled significantly, your monthly income could hit six figures just from subscriptions. For example, Scott’s Cheap Flights generates over $320,000 a month. If you add in affiliate marketing, your income goes up even more.
The most commonly quoted ROI for an email newsletter is $36 for every $1 spent for a large list and the right monetization strategy. However, this number can be somewhat misleading, as ROI can vary significantly from one niche to the next. $36 is an average across industries. For estimates on different industries, here’s a recent update.
How Do I Start a Profitable Email Newsletter?
To get started right away, we suggest the following steps:
1. Find your niche.
2. Decide the purpose of the newsletter: to solve, educate, entertain, or inspire.
3. Decide how to monetize it.
4. Get started on beehiiv!
Once you’re all set up, the next step is growing your audience. Here are a few more FAQs:
How Do I Get My First 100 Newsletter Subscribers?
Create opt-in forms and build a simple landing page that tells people what they will get when they subscribe. Connect your opt-in form to your ESP to automatically add every subscriber to your email list.
At first, you may have to hustle to get subscribers. Want to grow fast? Host a giveaway for the first 100 subscribers! You can also use personal connections, share on social media, and try to land a guest blogging gig to spread the word.
Use share requests in each newsletter. You can also include feedback loops (as simple as a “like'' or a quick survey) which guide you in giving your audience the content they want.
Surveys are one of the tools beehiiv offers to help you build an audience and boost engagement. The beehiiv referral program also helps grow your audience exponentially without spending a ton on advertising.
If you’re wondering how to make money with a newsletter, niche. It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond. However, don’t micro-niche and get trapped in a puddle. Also, don’t choose a trending niche where “everybody” is making money–especially if you are not interested in that niche.
Choose a topic you already love to talk about. Make sure this topic can be monetized: is there a problem that you can solve? Is it super interesting content they can’t find elsewhere for free? Is it funny? Is the niche big enough to attract paid advertisers?
Entrepreneur Russell Brunson recommends you start with one of three main markets: wealth, health, or relationships. Choose one, and then go three levels deep. Let’s use wealth as an example. Here’s a potential three-level breakdown:
Level one: submarket — how to make money online
Level two: small market — legitimate online work-from-home side hustles
Level three: niche market — how to succeed in online tutoring
Then, generate high-quality content that isn’t everywhere. Be unique! This will take time, but if you lay the foundation for exceptional content you’ll have your niche audience lining up to listen to what you have to say.
Great question. There are almost endless possibilities here, but in general, here are a few important things to keep in mind:
1. Choose a topic you’re passionate about. Passion really comes through and keeps your audience engaged.
2. Make it instantly recognizable. Create a logo, and choose your brand colors, fonts, and styles. beehiiv newsletter templates simplify creating eye-catching and easy-to-read newsletters.
3. Give them value: humor/entertainment, inspiration, information, or a solution to their problem.
4. Make them feel good. Add a nice surprise, or something pleasing, inspirational, fascinating, helpful, or nostalgic.
5. Be predictable and fresh. In part, be consistent — have your trademark “thing,” such as Weekly Tips or Monday Inspiration. Be fresh, new, and exciting.
6. Be short: basically, “hi, I’m thinking about you and I wanted to share this with you.” The only caveat to this is a paid newsletter, which needs to be bursting with value that they can’t get in a free newsletter.
7. Make it mobile-friendly. More than half of your audience will read your newsletter on their phone.
8. Don’t flood the inbox or they’ll unsubscribe (aside from daily news types of newsletters). For most newsletters, once a week, biweekly, or monthly is preferable.
9. Make it 90% informational, 10% promotional. People love to buy, but they hate to be sold to.
Read more on how to make money with a newsletter.
When you want to make money with newsletters, be mindful of the type you choose.
1. Interview newsletter: interviews with experts for education or inspiration, and/or interviews with interesting people for entertainment, along with the interviewer’s analysis and opinion. Monetize it through paid subscriptions and affiliate links.
2. Round-up newsletter: a monthly digest with condensed versions of recent articles, upcoming events, current promotions, and announcements. Monetize it through sponsorships and affiliate marketing.
3. Curated newsletter: a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter with curated content related to your niche: links to videos, articles, blogs, or other sources. Your subscribers will love that you did the research for them. If the content is hard to source by a simple web search, it could be worthy of a paid subscription. Otherwise, monetize it through sponsorships or affiliate links.
4. Paid newsletter: content available behind a paywall; not available for free anywhere else. Can feature exclusive interviews, product reviews, articles, how-to’s, behind-the-scenes looks, and insider’s tips. Monetize it through monthly subscriptions and affiliate links.
5. Blog update newsletter: a condensed version of your regular blog post, often with links to guest blogs. Monetize it through sponsorships or affiliate marketing.
For more inspiration, check out this post on how to craft a high-performing email newsletter.
What Is a Catchy Name for a Newsletter?
A catchy name will help your audience remember you. It’s also a calling card that says a lot about your business.
Names that rhyme: “Joe Knows”
To the point: “Insider Investment Tips”
Timely: “The Scoop”
Alliterative names: “Monday Morning Muse”
Puns: “Sprouts” (fresh picks, daily news, etc.)
Location: “Creative Corner”
Friendly: “Notes from Doc”
Your Niche is Your Happy Place!
Above all, find a niche that makes you happy so you can’t wait to share what you know. To learn more about how to create an exceptional newsletter in a niche you love, tools to grow your audience, and how to make money with a newsletter, check out the beehiiv blog.
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