$500K from one newsletter? Bet.

Good morning. Welcome to the first edition of Good Newsletters. Our goal here is to send out hyper-useful resources for your newsletter.

Think of this as a pilot show… we’re testing a few things out. So if you have any feedback or any suggestions on what to include, drop a note below.

Let’s jump to this week’s resources:

• Benchmark Data

• Monetization Case Study

• New TLDR Media Kit

Let’s jump in.

‏‏‎ ‎ DATA ‏‏‎ ‎

The Benchmarks

Here’s some data to compare your newsletter performance against:

This week, we pulled data from TLDR, Milk Road, Houck’s Newsletter, Tricycle Day, and the IdeaHub Newsletter.

Overtime we’ll build up a data bank for a bunch of these newsletters and open it up to all subscribers. Lookout for that in the coming weeks.

Reply to suggest a newsletter you want to see us include.

‏‏‎ ‎ CASE STUDY ‏‏‎ ‎

$500K from one newsletter? Bet.

Houck’s Newsletter has 88K subscribers looking for startup advice. And Houck drives some serious revenue – over $500K in 2023 alone.

Now let’s run through how he gets there…

1. Paid Subscriptions

He offer’s a super smooth onboarding to paid subscriptions.

With beehiiv, the upgrade page pops up after someone first subscribes allowing for an easy upselling experience.

In his case, he offers two plans:

Members get access to Houck’s community, resources, one-on-one time, an investor database, and a lot more.

Giving advise in your newsletter? Go all in on membership with genuinely useful benefits. That’s a monetization strategy that sticks.

But that’s not all.

2. Paid Ads

Paid slots are open to anyone looking be in a deep dive, “tool of the week” or a general featured placement.

Each of these are high revenue-driving offers:

He also uses a tool called Passionfruit to intake payment from advertisers. Passionfruit is also what Ben’s Bites uses too. One of the hottest tools out there for medium-to-large sized newsletters.

And one more…

3. Direct Product Offers

Offering events, courses and other direct service offers increase the revenue of existing subscribers substantially.

Marketed to existing subscribers, it’s not the first thing most folks see. That’s because it’s easier to upsell existing subscribers than it is to find new ones.

Houck doubles down on this by offers events and courses to active subscribers directly via email.

As a result, he increases the average revenue per subscriber (ARPS) and, therefore, the lifetime value (LTV).

‏‏‎ ‎ RESOURCE ‏‏‎ ‎

Media Kit: TLDR Newsletter

Check out this TLDR Newsletter Media Kit.

They just published it, updated for Q1 of 2024.

Here’s an overview (with data):

• 10 Newsletters

• Open Rates: 30% to 45%

• Range of 150K to 1.25M Subs

They offer 3 kinds of ads: Primary Ad, Secondary Ad, and Quick Links. Ad prices vary based on the specific newsletter.

Quick Links are a good way to drive incremental increases in revenue.

Newsletter portfolios like this often benefit from cross pollination of subscribers so overlap of the subscriber base is likely significant.

One brief note…

We run 12 newsletters.

All together, those 12 newsletters have around 1M+ subscribers.

And all the research we do for those newsletters is shared with you.

So if you know someone else who might like this, please consider sharing Good Newsletters with them.

See you next month ✌🏻