Welcome to Renegade Newsletters. This course is not intended to be a long winded, full of fluff and filler course, rather it is a condensed, straight-to the-point, everything I wish I had known when I started, brain dump.
Everything will be delivered here on SubStack and there will be an option at the top of each post to view every article in the series, it will look like this:
Over my career I have run several newsletters, some in marketing such as The Immediate Edge which peaked at 1,422 members paying $97 a month, to a hobby niche newsletter I run today with 636 members paying $7 a month.
The income range of a newsletter is relative to the the work you need to put in, the knowledge you need to have, the niche you are targeting, and the money you are willing to spend building your newsletter etc.
Right at this moment, I do not know what your interests are, and I hope to be able, over the next month, to get to know more of you, and what niche you are going after.
If you ask, I will give you my honest opinion on whether I think it will work, and I will give you any constructive feedback I can throughout this course and beyond.
I have helped several clients launch their newsletter business over the last few years. One built a free newsletter in the finance space and had 200,000+ subscribers. He made no revenue directly from the newsletter but his rapid growth enabled him to get sponsorship from two large vendors, and he also ran promotions from Agora and other marketing companies in that space.
He built his newsletter with paid advertising on Twitter. (which is still dirt cheap right now), and finally sold this newsletter in March this year for $1,500,000 and has just started another from scratch
Another has gone the totally opposite route with a paid newsletter. No freebies, just $5 a month for one or two posts a week. She currently has 2,400+ paid members and built that by giving away 8 high value lead magnets. She used Facebook to promote the lead magnets and built a list, then used Renegade Email to sell the newsletter. If you have read The Renegade Subscriber 2.0 report, this is the model she used.
(I will send you this soon)
Then, there is a friend of mine (not really a client unless you count buying me a bottle every now and again as payment) has built a hybrid newsletter much like The Raine Report, where there is a mix of free content, paid content, and a membership site with extra bonuses. He used SEO, SubStack’s internal promotion, Instagram, and Twitter posts to build his audience. He is now 15 months into his journey, writes a free article every two days and a paid one once a week, he has 440 paid members at $7 a month.
Not a job replacement at the moment, but he is on his way. He also runs affiliate promotions every couple of months or so and has just started building income from referral traffic to other newsletters.
All of these newsletter strategies are perfectly valid and I will be covering these throughout this course. I will be showing you live examples of newsletters in a range of diverse niches.
What route you take is up to you, but I will share the pros and cons of all these as well as what I think is the quickest route to success and replacing a job’s income…
… and that is what this course, and everything else I teach is about…
bringing in enough income to be comfortable without having to work every hour whichever deity of your choosing sends you.
I am 51 years old. I have lots of interests and hobbies I want to pursue, have travels to go on, a dog to walk, and a lovely wife I want to spend more time with. I don’t want to spend every waking hour of my life working hard only to realise I have very little time left before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
Which brings me to this…
You have to get started.
We all like the planning phase of any project. We like to consume training, make notes, create plans on whiteboards, do keyword research, scroll through Reddit and Quora, browse Facebook groups, write lists, etc.
But as soon as we have to commit, we are consumed by doubt, by the fear that it might not work.
I briefly touched on that in The Law Of 100 post I made.
So I want you to promise me one thing.
You will get started.
It costs nothing.
You don’t need a domain, you don’t need hosting, you don’t need an autoresponder, you don’t need an advertising budget, you don’t need to pay for anything to get started.
You just need to start. You need to take the leap, because you have NOTHING to lose.
In this course I will quickly get to the bit where you can make a decision, choose a path, and get started. Everything after that bit will only enhance your journey. If you haven’t started, then you can’t apply any of the things I teach. So, the quicker you get started, the quicker you can bring in an income.
It just takes one post.
Let the journey begin.