Monetization

Do you (or would you) sell ads in your newsletter?

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There’s a lot of interest in growing email lists via newsletter ads.

But there’s no good centralized resource of quality newsletters that offer ad spots.

And many list owners who would be open to running ads don’t advertise or even consider the fact.

Which got me wondering… do you sell ad spots in your newsletter? Or would you be open to it?

It could be a “classified ad” — a few lines of copy, tacked on to the rest of your regular newsletter content…

Or it could be “advertorial style” — a full email, dedicated to just the offer being advertised, written in your own words or voice.

And in case you don’t yet offer ads, but now I got you thinking about it, let me address a couple cloudy doubts that might be forming in your mind:

1. You always have the right to refuse an advertiser, so you only promote people who you can can vouch for, because they deliver good content & value.

2. Your list doesn’t need millions or billions of names to be interesting to advertisers. A huge list made up of a buncha bums is a pointless place to advertise. On the other hand, a small and highly engaged list, made up of quality people, can be plenty interesting to advertisers.

So do you (or would you) sell ads in your newsletter?

If so, hit reply and let me know. I’m putting together a little resource of newsletters that are open to sponsors or advertisers, and I’ll add you to it.

(And if you don’t have a newsletter, but do have an audience in some other shape — a community or podcast or YouTube channel — write in and let me know that also.)

Thanks in advance.

I promoted Dan Kennedy’s $0.99 audiobook but when the results rolled in!…

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This past Wednesday, I was moving my stuff from my old apartment, in the peripheral “Williamsburg of Barcelona,” to my new apartment, in the very heart of Barcelona.

It’s stressful to move, even though I have little stuff.

I found some movers on the Spanish version of Craigslist. They showed up unprepared, possibly drunk, and clearly determined to take as much advantage as they could of the fact they were being paid per hour, rather than per completed job.

It took 3 and 1/2 hours for them to move a few plants and a few trashbags’ worth of stuff 3 miles across town.

My day was eaten up with preparing for this move… with witnessing the move in all its glacial fury… and then with recovering from the move ie. hiding the trashbags of stuff in places around my new apartment where I cannot see them and don’t have to think about them for a while.

All that’s to say, on Wednesday I really had no time or brain power to write my daily email.

So I took post from my Daily Email House community, in which House member Anthony La Tour shared how it’s now possible to get get several super valuable, multi-thousand dollar Dan Kennedy seminars for the cost of an Audible audiobook, and I basically sent that out as my email.

Results:

$306 in Audible bounties so far, plus about a dozen readers writing in to say “thank you” for cluing them into this offer.

Conclusions:

#1 Audible can be a legit “in-between” offer to promote

The regular Amazon affiliate program pays peanuts, but the bounties when somebody signs up for Audible are generous — $10 for a $0.99 trial, whether the customer sticks or not.

When you add it all up, and add up some other bounties Amazon is giving to affiliates, you get the $306 I made with my email on Wednesday.

$306 is not “pay for a house” money.

But I wasn’t in the middle of promoting anything anyhow. $306 is a decent return for spending about 15 mins to “write” and schedule an email in the middle of moving apartments.

Of course, in order for this to be a repeatable thing, it would take other unique audiobook deals — either something not available in other formats, or only available for drastically more in other formats, like the Dan Kennedy thing.

#2. There’s great value in telling people something new

On Wednesday, I had no idea whether talking about this Audible deal would make me any money.

I knew it was still a good thing to share this deal in my email.

Because much more than the direct money from the sales you might make, there’s value in telling people something new.

Genuine news hooks readers on opening your emails in the future as well, and at least checking out you future offers also. After all, they might miss out! And few new things are as interesting as a legit new deal on something people already want.

#3. “How can they afford this???”

Audible pays out $10 bounties for somebody signing up for a $0.99 trial.

That connected in my mind to Internet Marketer Igor Kheifets’s pretty irresistible offer to affiliates:

Igor is currently paying out a $30 commission for each affiliate sale of his $3.99 book.

How can Amazon (and Igor) afford to do this?

They can afford to do it because:

1. They know their numbers ie. what a new customer in this funnel is worth to them, and

2. They have high-enough numbers, because they make new customers all kinds of additional offers in the form of order bumps, upsells, downsells, and cross-sells.

And that’s just in that one funnel.

After the customer buys, Amazon and (Igor) own the customer relationship. They can then simply make new backend offers from now till doomsday. As Igor wrote to me as I was promoting his book, “I only need one backend sale to cover everything.”

I’ve long been guilty of not having either of the 2 items above.

#1 (not knowing what a new customer in a funnel is worth to me) is fairly easy and quick to fix.

#2 (not having two dozen other offers to make in one funnel) is less so.

But I’m working on both of them. And I’m sharing what I’m learning, and I’m trying to take some people along for the ride. If you wanna go for that ride as well:

https://bejakovic.com/house

How list owners can get off social media for good

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Yesterday I wrote about a new 1:1 coaching program I am offering. I got an “indicator of interest” about that from an online business owner who already has a sizeable list and business.

When I asked him what even got him interested in this offer, he replied:

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What got me interested was simply learning from you directly. I’ve always admired the life you live, the things you’re able to do, and how you’ve managed to do it all while not slaving to social media.

I’ve been trying to find ways to get off social media for good, but yet to crack the code.

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In the words of Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University and originator of the “Acres of Diamonds” story, “I am astonished that so many people should care to hear this story over again.”

You’ve probably heard “Acres of Diamonds” already in some form. In three bare-bones acts:

1. Guy leaves his farm in a fruitless search for diamonds.

2. Guy gets increasingly poor and frantic as the years pass, and finally decides to end it all by drowning himself in the sea, off the coast off Barcelona (no joke, that’s the original story, look it up).

3. Meanwhile, back home, diamonds are discovered all throughout his farm, buried under an inch or two of sand and soil.

The moral of that story, at least for me, is “get more out of what you’ve already got.”

If you’ve got an email list, that translates to getting more out of your existing list eg. (much) more monetization.

Monetization makes it so you’re not dependent on constantly getting new leads in, so you can get off social media for good, if you feel like you’re slaving away there.

Monetization also makes it so you have much more choice about where and how you source your leads if you do want to grow your list.

If a new reader is worth a lotta money for you — via more monetization — then you stop being dependent on sources of free leads like social media. You can instead grow your list by reaching out to the best sources of leads (in my experience, other list owners) and making them outrageous deals that are too good for them to refuse.

As for the how-to specifics and details of more monetization, that will depend on what you do, what your niche is, what your goals are, and where personal no-go lines lie.

If you want my help and years of experience to help you with that:

I’ve got this new 1:1 coaching program, which runs for a year.

This coaching program is reasonably low-cost, because accountability and whip-cracking are not a part of it.

In order for me to be useful to you at all with this coaching program, I need to see you have some runway already.

In case you’re interested, hit reply and tell me a bit about your situation with your list.

Specifically, I’m interested in things like how many people you have on your list… how many new people you’re getting in an average week… what kinds of offers you’ve made so far… and how that’s gone for you.