It's not avocado toast plaguing millennial budgets anymore. It's newsletters.
The New York Times is worried people are spending too much money on newsletters and not enough money on their games.
The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka thinks writing might as well be declared dead in the era of "parasocial holograms."
WIRED fears the door might be closing on Substack, given how "bad" subscription fatigue is. Their subscription publication wants to make sure your subscription publication is ok.
Every day, someone who is not in the newsletter business has a different take on whether or not you should get into the newsletter business.
Here is mine.
Newsletters vs email marketing
Not everything sent en masse via email is a newsletter.
I would define a newsletter, for our purposes here, as a media product. Meaning that it stands alone and doesn't (usually) sell something else. If you write a newsletter about what's happening in your neighborhood, the thing I'm signing up for is the information inside the newsletter. It's not a funnel to buying a house. If the newsletter is a funnel to selling me a house, that's email marketing.
Your newsletter can be stories, personal reflections, original reporting, educational, comedy or community contributions. It can take many formats, but in all cases for something that is a newsletter, the newsletter IS the product. It is not a means to sell or deliver a different product.
Email marketing is more common with businesses who make money NOT with newsletters. A restaurant sends new menu updates and holiday specials via email marketing to reach customers. A web designer sends tips about websites as a way to keep in touch with clients and prospects.
If you want to write, grow and monetize a newsletter AS the product, then you might have a newsletter business on your hands.
If you just want an email list you can send updates to about what you're up to or when you have openings for new clients, you absolutely should do that. That's not a newsletter. It's an email list. It's super effective. And it's not what we're talking about here.
Free newsletters
I don't know why anyone would want a free newsletter anymore. I don't see a point to this and I don't see an upside to it. If you just like to write for writing's sake, get a journal. Join a writing group. Take a writing class.
When people start a free newsletter, it's often because they want a way to build their brand. I would classify that as email marketing, because the newsletter is not the product—you or your business is. This label is not THAT important, but the reason I am making this delineation is that advice about newsletters and advice about email marketing is VERY DIFFERENT. Know which kind you are doing and what your purpose is. Why a newsletter? What's the result you want from it?
If you are a writer and your service is freelance writing or editing, then the lines get blurry here and you could have a free newsletter product that leads people to want to hire you to write in a similar fashion or about the same subjects. Again, I don't understand why you wouldn't want to monetize it anyway, even if you don't want it to be your primary revenue stream. Make some money from the newsletter. Make some money from the work it brings you. Por qué no los dos?
Newsletters are a lot of work and they can become expensive to run so be clear about what return you expect from your free newsletter before you start. Is it client leads? Job prospects? Speaking invitations? Book sales? Something else?
What does "build your brand" actually look like?
Write down what makes this free newsletter worth your time. How many client leads. How many speaking invitations. What kind of feedback. From who. And when you want to see these results. This quarter. This year. In five years.
If your newsletter does well and attracts more than a couple thousand people, you will likely have to start paying for your platform and that's when you might want to ask yourself if it's time to become a paid newsletter.
Paid newsletters
Paid newsletters are my jam. They are my business now and I see A TON of opportunity in this space for you and anyone who wants to go after it too.
The problem is that Substack conned everyone into thinking they could launch a newsletter and go full time in mere months, thanks to the "magic dust" of Substack's bargain basement growth team.
You have to build your own paid newsletter business. Substack will not do it for you, though they will happily take credit for your success! Be sure you're up for the task of finding your audience, convincing them to pay and shipping issues year round on a regular cadence.
Newsletter businesses are real businesses. They take many hours a week to do well. Writing is part of it, but you also have to learn how to market and sell plus you have all the normal business overhead too like managing Stripe accounts, handling taxes, dealing with legal issues and paying for software that helps you do all the above. It's super fun and rewarding and I do think most people can pull it off, but it can be demoralizing if you don't come into it with an existing audience or an obvious topic.
What makes a paid newsletter different from free newsletters and email marketing is the way you make money. A paid newsletter is monetized FROM the newsletter itself.
I can only think of three revenue streams that apply here: subscriptions, sponsorships and one time contributions. Those three income sources exist because the newsletter exists. The newsletter's growth expands the revenue potential for all three and they each depend on the newsletter being delivered to work.
I'm being a purist about this to draw some lines between email marketing, free newsletters and paid newsletters. In reality, you could run a sponsored newsletter and consider it a "free newsletter" because you don't charge your readers. I just get a lot of notes from confused people asking "Should I start a newsletter?" and I want to say "I thought you were in tile manufacturing?" and then a month later, they're like "Oh yeah, I just want to sell more tile." What they really needed was an email list.
I don't care what you call your newsletter email marketing mass email content media business. I do care how you take my advice and I don't want you wasting your time chasing a path you don't really want to go down. That's why I want anyone reading this to understand how I (and many other people) define these terms.
My paid newsletter started as an email marketing list. In those days, sending emails was still time well spent for me because people bought my memberships or classes or products. The newsletter wasn't the product though. It was a vehicle for a sale. Now, it's the product.
So, which one is right for you?
If you want to build your brand and advertise your business, I would start an email list.
If you want to build your brand, but writing is your business, you can start a free newsletter, if you really, really want to. Though, I strongly consider running an easy-for-you paid model with just lower expectations than a full time paid newsletter writer would set.
If you want to make the newsletter a business on its own, then you should start a paid newsletter.
If you're going the paid newsletter route, I encourage you to consider a hybrid revenue model of subscriptions and sponsorships. You can't run a business off of tips. But you can run a healthy business off a mix of subscriptions and sponsorships and you can add some products and services in later if you'd like to expand your newsletter-centric business too.
If you're not sure that you want to start a paid newsletter, try running some surveys or polls to your existing audience about your proposed offer. Ask them to pitch into a one time campaign (I call this a reader raise) and see if they do. You can always refund them if you don't actually want to launch your project.
Everything changes based on what you want to achieve with your newsletter. So the question is not "should I start a newsletter?" It's "why do I want to start a newsletter?"
For more on running paid newsletters, check out my posts on JournalistsPayThemselves.com
For more on email marketing, check out my posts under Email and Newsletters 👇
Lex Roman
