Last night, I got an email with the subject line “Ideas for working together.” The person writing me this email is the silent partner in the company of a good friend of mine.
The background is that over the course of a couple of decades, this guy built up a large media company. He then sold it three years ago for some undisclosed but I assume ungodly sum of money.
He has been sitting on his wealth since, and investing here and there. But he finds retirement boring, so he wants to get back to work and put on a conference, which is something he used to do a lot of as part of his media company.
The topic of his proposed new conference is exactly the topic of my health newsletter, which I’ve been publishing weekly since the start of this year. So we talked last week about working together in some way.
And then he wrote me last night about ideas for how this might look:
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Some options
– I buy your newsletter and you come work for me
– You buy my conference and I come work for you
– I invest in your company
– We do an operating deal
– I promote your newsletter and you promote my conference
– You help me with speakers and content and you moderate a panel and we promote your newsletter
– I buy (bulk) your books to give away at conferences. Private labeled with our brand.
Other? I am wide open
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I don’t know what if anything will come of this.
I’m only sharing it because A) I started my health newsletter at the end of January and B) today in the middle of October there’s somebody credible and with money in his pockets who is talking about buying my newsletter or pouring some of his money into it.
Again, maybe this won’t turn into anything. Or maybe it will.
In any case, I’m pressing on with my health newsletter because I feel I’m on the right path.
Subscriber numbers keep growing. I’m getting positive feedback from readers. There are referrals. I’m starting to make money. And I have clear ideas in mind for the next steps to take to both grow subscriber count and to monetize better.
Back in March, I wrote an email about my “Plan Horse”:
“Plan Horse is to find a new opportunity to latch onto, but in a way that you will come out ahead whether the opportunity drops dead or delivers as hoped.”
I feel that publishing your own newsletter today is exactly this kind of opportunity.
If a specific newsletter catches steam, it might turn into a big thing.
If it doesn’t, but you do a good job with the newsletter itself, then you wind up with a list of people who are interested in a topic and trust you to tell them about it. This is a profitable position to be in one way or another.
You might think this is simply another restatement of the benefits of email marketing.
Yes and no.
Email marketing is great. But I’m talking about something different, which is really when email is the main product.
My health newsletter definitely falls into that category. In many ways, this daily email newsletter you are reading now also falls into that category.
This daily newsletter is not primarily there to promote a specific offer or another business I have.
The newsletter itself is really the main product I offer, and I just find occasional ways to monetize it by repackaging what I’ve learned through this newsletter and presenting it in a course, or a live training, or maybe some other, new format…
… which brings me to my feeling-out offer for today.
Again, I believe the moment is golden for publishing your own newsletter, of either stamp:
It can be personality-based and talk about direct marketing and business opportunities, something like what you are reading now.
Or it can be not tied to a specific personal identity and it can talk about an entirely different topic, like my health newsletter.
Either way, I believe the opportunity is great, and the opportunity is now.
So I’ve been thinking about putting together a paid mastermind or community of some sort that would be all about publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter.
The ultimate goal would be to share ideas and work together to create a newsletter-based business — something that either happily coughs up cash every month, or something that you can sell down the line for some undisclosed but ungodly sum of money.
To start, the core content of this mastermind or community would be based on what I am learning and doing myself with my own newsletters from week to week. But I might also seek out other people who are experts in specific newsletter-related topics to present.
I am interested in creating such a community or mastermind because I’m planning to double-down with my health newsletter, so such a community would benefit me as much as anybody else joining me.
But I’ve learned my lesson before.
And that lesson is, gauge interest before committing even a day’s worth of work into creating a new offer.
So in case an ongoing community or mastermind around publishing, growing, and monetizing a newsletter is something you’d be interested in, then hit reply and tell me so.
Of course, if you’d like to expand by telling me more, you can do that too, because any extra info will influence whether I decide to put this new offer together and what to put inside of it. Thanks in advance.