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5 Newsletter Business Ideas you Can Start & CASH IN
Ingeniosity Issue #38
Bill McIntosh
October 11, 2024
Quote of the day:
What if I told you that 10 years from now, your life would be exactly the same? I doubt you’d be happy. So, why are you so afraid of change?
– Karen Salmansohn
Here’s the docket for today:
The 5 best newsletter businesses that I handpicked for people who want to make a ton in 2025.
4 training resources you can use to finally start your dream newsletter.
A downloadable slide deck resource I made.
But, before we get into it…
Prefer to listen instead of read? Check out the audio version of this issue on our YouTube channel:
Did you hear about Jennifer Chou?
In 4 months, she launched her newsletter and made over $16,000 with it.
And she’s not the only one making money with a newsletter business.
If you stick around, you’ll see people like Hamza, who was able to pull off $200,000 in 6 months with his newsletter.
But where do you start - especially if you have a fulltime job?
Who has the time to launch and blow up a newsletter business on top of a full time job? Or as a parent?
Unfortunately, most newsletter businesses just aren’t a fit for people on a tight schedule…
But what if I told you there were 5 newsletter business ideas you could launch and grow on a part time schedule?
What if these ideas were so simple, you could sit down and get your newsletter going in one afternoon?
Well, lucky for you, I dug around and found 5 newsletter business ideas you could sit down and launch this afternoon.
Let’s get into it.
By the way, this training originally comes from a slide deck I made for the corresponding YouTube video, to get that slide deck, just go here:
Number five is a local newsletter. We're featuring Ryan, who created a local newsletter for the Annapolis area. He has cashed in to an 18,000 subscriber newsletter that makes over $200,000.
The crazy thing about this is that 18,000 subscribers is almost half of the population that lives in his town, and he did all of that as a solo business owner, just all by himself.
I like local newsletters because there's a low barrier to entry. You don't have to have any specialized knowledge; all you have to do is know about your local area. That's it.
There's low competition, so at least for now, there are not a lot of people doing this. Shockingly, it is a massive opportunity.
The thing is, in your local area, there's a high demand for people to want to know what the good businesses are, what the events are, what the news is, what's happening, and what's going on in your local area.
People are continuously interested in this, so it's an evergreen, in-demand source of content that becomes very easy to create your weekly newsletter about your local area.
You can easily get a large population to subscribe to your newsletter, just like Ryan did. If you're in a smaller city, by the way, people might get worried that it's going to be harder, and in many ways, it might be easier than if you lived in a large, huge metropolitan city.
Moving on, idea number four: affiliate newsletters.
This one is something you hear me talk about a lot. You hear me talking about affiliate marketing, which is when you promote someone else's product or service, and you get paid a commission for doing so.
In this example here, you can see Capital Friday did a feature on Hamza, who created routines.club. You can see here that he's up to making $200,000 with that business. Now, all he does, shockingly, is talk about morning routines, meaning what do successful people do in their mornings.
He merely talks about that, but now what he does is he plugs different products, services, tools, software, whatever the audience might be interested in. He just naturally talks about products that they want, that they need, and that solve problems related to his niche.
Then he's promoting affiliate links. When he drops a link and makes a product recommendation, these are not like paid sponsorships; it's a commission. So if someone clicks and someone goes and buys the product that he recommends, he gets paid a commission.
You could do this in almost any niche market you can imagine, and you don't have to have your own product or service. This makes the barrier to entry very low.
You just talk about a passionate niche market that has unique problems they want to solve and goals they want to achieve. You just talk about it and naturally promote good quality products and services that can help that audience, and you get paid a commission when you do so.
As you can see here, his site is routines.club. That's the famous routines of famous and successful people. An example place I love going to is ClickBank. I'm a big fan of ClickBank for different kinds of affiliate offers, so I'd recommend you check there first.
Want to start this newsletter business yourself? Check out this rundown I put out:
Moving on, idea number three: this is the idea of a curated newsletter. What the heck does that mean?
Well, this is when you collect resources, links, things from around the web, and you just share them with your audience. That's it.
You're like a museum curator. A museum curator collects up interesting and educational things and shares them with the people going through the museum. So you are a curator in your niche market. You could pick any niche of anything, whether something that you're interested in or something you know that there is a lot of money in. You pick your niche market, and then all you do is share the latest news, industry information, trends, helpful tips, and advice.
You don't have to create any original content; that's literally zero original content. You just reshare interesting stuff that you find.
As you can see here, this is a one-man business who has created a multi-million dollar business, over $5 million in revenue, as a one-man business who's just curating, collecting, and sharing information about his newsletter.
So once again, all he did was find interesting stuff and share those links with his audience, and he cashed in and made all of that money.
Here’s an example of a recent issue - he collected a story, dropped a link, and wrote up a little paragraph summarizing the piece:
Let's move on to number two. This one is a little surprising, and I'm very intrigued by this. Okay, this is a newsletter where all they do is interview people by email. They find experts in their market or people that they find intriguing or interesting, and they get them to agree to do an email newsletter. They send them over a set of written questions, they get answered, and they publish them in their weekly newsletter.
You could see here, this is the newsletter right here. It's called Founderoo, and they interview business founders:
This is an example of one of them interviewing this guy here, Andrew Kamphey . Now, this interview, again, is just an email interview. They sent them a list of questions, learned about the story of this person founding their business, and then they're sharing it with their audience. So they just email interview people. That's it. That's the entire business model.
This one is very intriguing to me because it seems like a very low-effort way to meet cool people, meet people who are connected, get to know them, and get to share a little bit of information, a little bit of their insights, a little bit of their tips and advice. It doesn't require you to jump on camera; you don't have to jump on mic, you don't have to do a podcast.
Here's the other reason why I really love this one: I know for me, I am not a consumer of podcasts. You know, like when two people sit down and they just do an interview, Joe Rogan will do like those crazy epic 4-hour ones.
But I am a busy person. I don't have four hours to sit down and listen to a podcast to try to find one or two nuggets out of it that have value to me. So I don't personally consume a lot of podcasts.
But here, you can do this without having to sit and listen to a 2-hour podcast. You actually get the same kind of value. It's like a written podcast in a sense, and for people that are short on time and just want to get to the meat of it, this is a fantastic product. I really love this business model.
Let's move on to number one: repurpose what you're already doing. If you're already working in an industry, you're already an expert in your industry, or maybe you're in an industry that the public is interested in, all you have to do is talk about your job.
Now, this may sound incredibly boring to you, but trust me, there's a lot of people out there who want to hear from you.
Here is an example here of someone who took their 9-to-5, took his background in managing car dealerships, to 455k followers, 65,000 readers of his newsletter, and an incredibly profitable little business here:
Let's say that you have been able to build a very successful career as a nurse. You have a great job, you're making a great wage. There are lots of people trying to break into your career who would love to listen to your perspective.
As an example, I would pick either being an industry insider and talking to your industry or talking to the public about your industry if you have inside knowledge or information about it.
Same thing, a nurse's perspective, let's say an emergency room nurse, might be incredibly interesting to an audience of, I don't know, moms for example, who have kids that are constantly getting sick or they're worried about their children.
So that could be the perspective of a nurse about raising children and keeping them healthy. But leverage your career, your industry knowledge, and information that you personally might find boring, but others will get incredible value out of it.
What Next?
Now, one of the things that I want to wrap up with on this is that you can blend and mix and match from all five of those strategies. So in many of them, there are two or three strategies you can mix together. Like, why not do an email newsletter on your career but also promote affiliate products inside of it?
Go back through these, figure out which one is the best fit for you. These fit two different scenarios: either you have a business and you want to add a newsletter component to it (you could use and borrow from all of these strategies), or maybe you don't yet have your first business and you're trying to get your first dollar made online and scale that up into your very first successful business.
All five of these can get the job done. Each one of them, I showed you an example of someone who started from zero and in a relatively quick period of time was able to make substantial income from their email newsletter.
On that note, let me know in a reply to this email, if you have any questions at all about starting, marketing, growing, how to get subscribers, or anything at all. Pop them into the a reply. I'll come back, and I’ll see if I can help answer your questions.
Have AI Build Your Business
For those of you who are not yet a Push Button AI customer, you need to check this out.
All you need to do is go to pushbutton.ai/demo and you can get a live one-on-one appointment to get on Zoom and see this powerful technology in action.
With Push Button AI, it will build an entire business from bottom to top, everything you need from your domain name to your logo, videos, audio lessons, an entire course that you can sell as your own, a 30-day email sequence where you can send a daily email for 30 days all written by AI, and a whole lot more.
It writes your sales page. If you're not sure how to write an expert sales page to convince people to buy stuff, it writes it for you.
It writes a report that you can give away to get subscribers to your list. It even creates and writes the opt-in subscription page to get people to subscribe to get the report, and it goes on and on.
It even writes your first 10 blog posts for you and it can do so much more - social media posts, ads, all of these things are done. All you have to do is answer a couple of questions and push a button.
Now, Push Button AI is not available to the public at the time of this newsletter issue, and the only way to get in is by invite to our behind-the-scenes beta access.
During your live demo, we'll show you the technology, we'll actually work with you to map out an entire course that you could sell as your own. We'll outline the course with you together on the one-on-one Zoom call, and then if you so decide, if you're a good fit, you can come in, join our Push Button AI beta program, and be in business with that very course by the next day.
Go to pushbutton.ai/demo to figure out if this powerful technology is right for you. You can register there, you'll book an appointment in the calendar.
Be sure you show up - our team will be very excited to meet you and show you how the tech works, outline your new course for you, and hopefully it's a fit and we can work together to launch your next business.
And as a ‘thank you’ for making it this far, I’ve compiled a few dozen resources on starting your very own newsletter business, check them out:
If you want to learn more about newsletters, I recommend checking out these other trainings we produced:
Resource Roundup
A quick roundup of guides, growth hacks, assets, and other resources to help you quadruple your life and your business:
What do you want?
Are you looking to grow your business? Here is how I can help:
See how AI can build you a business from scratch.
We built a custom GPT meant to help people start and write their own newsletters.
Watch over 50 hours of business training posted to help take your business to the next level.
I wrote up a no-fluff, no-nonsense guide on the 8 AI tools we’re using to make content that we’re using in our business ecosystem to get new customers and scale fast.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: I’m just a guy on the Internet who’s had some good luck. Mostly because I’m stubborn and don’t give up when I build a new business. Nothing I say in my videos or on my channel should be taken as a promise you’ll get similar results to mine, or any results or case studies I show. Most people who try to start a business online quit before they ever achieve success. So, the average result for most people trying to start businesses in general is quite low. Many lose money and quit before they ever achieve profitability.
SPONSORSHIPS & AFFILIATE LINKS: You should assume I have a financial relationship with any company I mention or products/services I recommend. This could be an affiliate link where I earn a commissions, a sponsorship or a company I am an owner or partner in. That being said, I will not promote something that I wouldn’t recommend without being paid for it. I will do my best to only mention useful, ethical & legitimate businesses3