- Passionate Income
- Posts
- The 15 Hour per Week Business Model Part II
The 15 Hour per Week Business Model Part II
This is how you build a newsletter in three hours/day.
1,788 Words | 7 min 27 Sec Read
Welcome to another issue of Passionate Income.
Today we’ll deliver Part Two in our two-part series re: how to build a newsletter business in 15 hours per week.
In Part I, which you can read here, we discussed the prep work involved in launching a newsletter. In Part II, we’ll discuss how you could actually build this kind of business working just three hours per day Monday to Friday.
Let’s dive in.
Auto Insurance: Overpriced!
Just because you have to renew your auto insurance every 6 months does not mean you have to overpay!
The sad truth: 50% of U.S. drivers overpay for their auto insurance.
There are 3 SIMPLE steps to solve the problem:
Step 1) Visit our page on this
Step 2) Enter your Zip Code, fill out a 1-page form
You will really enjoy the benefits of this simple process; you no longer have to be in the 50% that overpays!
Once your newsletter is setup, there are three main components to the business:
Growth
Content
Monetization
Growth refers to constantly increasing the number of people who are subscribed to receive your content. Content refers to the actual newsletter emails you’ll be sending. And monetization refers to what you likely care about most: Actually getting some revenue and profit coming in.
Below, our Monday to Friday breakdown will cover all three.
Further, it should be noted that if you’re in a B2B niche where you can generate leads for businesses, it probably won’t make very much sense to monetize with less than 2,500 subscribers.
If you’re in a B2C niche, where sponsorship CPMs are lower and lead gen payouts aren’t as high, you can monetize as early as you want, but probably won’t see any meaningful kind of revenue come in until you reach 10,000+ subs.
But remember, unlike freelancing, you’re building an asset you can sell.
Similar to niche websites, Amazon Kindle brands, etc., most businesses that can be sold as part of an acquisition take months if not years before they generate substantial profits.
So you should look at this as something you’ll build on the side, not something that will pay you big money in the short-term. If you need something to bring in cash now, check out this issue and/or this one.
Let’s get into the breakdown.
Monday / Wednesday / Friday 📆
As mentioned in Part I, we recommend doing a 3x per week newsletter. Why?
Because if you only send one per week, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to monetize once you build a larger following. If you think of your newsletter like a digital newspaper, it’s obvious the daily paper has 6x more advertising slots than the weekly Sunday paper.
At the same time, sending a daily newsletter is difficult for a variety of reasons.
First, if your industry doesn’t lend itself to breaking news (e.g. politics, finance, tech, crypto, etc.), it’s going to be hard for you to come up with valuable content every single day.
Second, burnout is a very real problem in the newsletter space.
While many people get excited about the potential to sell their newsletter as part of an exit, that excitement quickly dies when they realize just how much work is involved.
So, we recommend sending 3x per week.
In terms of what to send, keep in mind capital “N” Newsletters are different from marketing emails.
In general, Newsletters are 100% content-focused, but contained occasional promotions inside. Meaning, this is not the Internet marketing guru style email where they try to tie stories in with some kind of pitch for a product.
Instead, your newsletter should be 100% value first.
Which in most industries, means sharing breaking news, education, and most important, your unique takes on whatever industry you’re operating in.
I emphasize the part about your unique takes because you are not trying to build a news portal. There are plenty of news websites out there that are going to do a much better job than you when it comes to actually sharing the news.
Instead, what you want to do is put your unique spin on whatever is relevant to your target audience. For example, while newsletters are hot right now, nothing we’re talking about today is breaking news.
Instead, we’re sharing some education and insight for people who are interested in building a business around their passions.
Which makes sense for us and our audience given our entire brand is built around the concept of Passionate Income.
So, whether it’s humor, your unique writing style, your particular political slant, etc, don’t just parrot what’s already been said. And don’t ever copy-paste AI-generated content into your newsletter.
You can use AI to draft and brainstorm, but if you want your newsletter to succeed, you need to do something to make it stand out from the competition. And the easiest way to do that is by injecting your personality into the content itself.
Last, once you get the hang of it, it should take you no more than 2 to 2.5 hours to write each issue. Especially once you start using templates, which are critical to cutting down on how much time you spend formatting. Add another 30 minutes for inserting images and proofreading and poof…
You are now sending a 3x per week newsletter in just 3 hours per day.
*In terms of where to get the images, both Beehiiv and Substack are integrated with a stock photo side, while the monthly Canva plan gives you access to millions of stock photos for just $15 per month. Further, depending on the audience, you may also be able to use AI-generated images.
Tuesday / Friday 📆
Tuesday and Thursday will be focused on growth.
While many people who are strong writers gravitate to newsletters, the truth is growth is just as important as producing good content. Because as you likely know, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if nobody sees it.
Further, without growth, you won’t be able to monetize.
Which, unless you’re doing this as a hobby, is the entire point of building a newsletter.
While it might not sound like a lot, six hours of focused, zero-distraction work time is actually quite a bit. The caveat is that you must actually be focused and not get distracted (easier said than done).
Either way, if you have money to invest, the absolute easiest way to grow is through newsletter referral programs. The most popular being Sparkloop Upscribe (which we use), Beehiiv Recommendations (which we also use), and Substack Recommendations.
The way these services work is by recommending your newsletter to other people who are already interacting with similar newsletters. In exchange for this kind of promotion, you will typically pay $1 to $3 per new subscriber.
Given you can set this up in a matter of minutes, its our opinion this is by far the easiest way to grow a newsletter. Especially if you’re not tech savvy / do not have any experience running things like Facebook Ads (which can be highly complex).
In fact, this method is so passive you could do this in less than three hours/day, twice/week. In reality, it won’t take you much longer than 5-10 minutes per day.
If you don’t have money to invest, you’ll need to go the organic route.
While there are tons of options for doing this, LinkedIn and Reddit are by far the hottest options for most newsletter operators.
In particular, growing a following on LinkedIn works because it’s the only text-first platform left that offers good organic reach (in terms of organic Twitter is basically dead now).
Admittedly, we can’t deliver an entire LinkedIn Organic Marketing Course in one short email. But if you hop over to YouTube or Twitter and do some searching, there’s tons of content on how to do this.
As for Reddit, this is an underground hack very few people are talking about.
The way it works is writing long-form posts that provide 100% value, but then at the very end, letting people know you publish even more content on your newsletter.
While Reddit is known for destroying people who try to pitch their products and services in the feed, the reason this works is because it’s a value-first approach.
By offering value first (in the form of content), and then offering even more (in the form of your free newsletter), Redditors seem to be willing to overlook the fact you’re technically “promoting” something.
In terms of where to learn more about this strategy, we recommend this podcast episode.
With that said, organic growth is hard and requires serious discipline.
Because of that, to hit our goal of working just three hours per day, we highly recommend alternative strategies like newsletter swaps, guests posts, etc. versus trying to build a brand via organic content on social media.
So when are you supposed to monetize?
Given it will likely take months before you have enough subscribers, this isn’t something you’ll need to worry about (or set aside time for) in the beginning.
Further, most businesses that grow fast do so because the owner reinvests profits into growth instead of taking money out to pay himself/herself.
So, once you get a couple thousand subscribers, you should be able get some cash coming in as a result of recommending other people’s newsletters. In which case you become the referrer instead of the newsletter receiving the referral.
Next, with a couple thousand subscribers, you can start linking out to affiliate offers. At which point you can once again reinvest the profits to grow faster.
The reason we mention the above strategies is because you can setup both of them in a matter of minutes. Which, once again, aligns with our goal of working just three hours per day.
Over time, as your business grows, you’ll want to get more serious about growth and monetization however. At which point you should probably hire someone else to write the content for you.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
By following the plan above, and focusing on content Mon / Wed / Fri, and growth Tue / Thu, you will eventually find yourself in a position to monetize.
And if you’ve done things right, and built a high quality audience as a result of publishing high quality content, monetizing will be the easy part.
At which point you will probably want to work more than 15 hours per week. Why?
Because now, you have a legitimate and profitable business on your hands. One you can potentially sell, like some of the ones you see listed here.
Join our Lucky Draw and have a chance to win an Apple iPad by subscribing!
🗞What’s the point of reading countless news articles while gaining no insight?
🦉Market Hedwig is a highly-rated platform where investors have access to 5-minute weekly financial articles created by ex-investment bankers, who summarize key market news from a professional finance perspective, including opinions across various asset classes.
🎁Subscribe to our FREE newsletter to stay ahead in the ever-changing financial markets.
💡 Takeaway: Similar to any other business, the newsletter business is not easy. But with just three moving pieces - Content, Growth and Monetization - there’s no denying the newsletter business is simple. Commit to the long-term, provide value and you too can succeed with this business model.
I'll leave you with this quote…
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
What'd you think of today's edition?(this helps us make the next one a better edition) |