Is Starting A Newsletter Your Passport To Riches?
Start a newsletter is a great way of building a relationship with readers and earning more money as content creator
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The internet is a noisy place, particularly for creators who want to build relationships with readers and fans. It’s hard to earn a living when so much great content is available for free.
Is a paid newsletter the answer for your content business?
Hamish McKenzie is co-founder and chief operating officer of Substack, a service that enables anyone to set up free and premium newsletters.
According to McKenzie, the service claims thousands of newsletter writers and millions of readers.
McKenzie, Christopher Best and Jairaj Sethi set up Substack in 2017. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company raised $65 million in funding in 2021
Substack’s mission is to “Make it simple to start a publication that makes money from subscriptions.” The service’s homepage cites the example of a newsletter writer with 800 paying subscribers. If subscribers paid just $7 a month, the newsletter writer could earn $4,400 a month.
“The audience doesn’t have to be huge,” McKenzie says. “You can be appealing just to a small group of people. If they’re paying you some money, then that small group can actually support a pretty healthy income pretty quickly.
“So it’s not like the old world where you have to reach an audience of millions in the hope of getting some advertising revenue.”
Popular Substack newsletters cover a diverse range of topics including cryptocurrency, reading recommendations, comedy writing, women in sports, happiness, climate change, journalism, faith, progressive news from China and lots more.
“There are millions of editorial niches that can flourish on Substack and make money for the writers,” McKenzie says.
“Things that are on a single subject and very focused tend to be more shareable, because then people can say on Twitter for example, ‘Hey look at this great post about Brexit or about the climate crisis.’”
