176: The Newsletter Profit System: Make Money Every Time You Publish

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here and today I wanted to talk about an issue and something that I have struggled with for a long time and how I solved for it. Now today, every time I hit send or on my weekly newsletter publication which is called the Creators MBA in my personal brand and we also do one for hobby school. So whenever I send that out, hit publish on that, I sell either my own digital products. I may be getting some affiliate income, I may be getting some sponsor income if we have a sponsor for that particular email newsletter or, or I may be getting a coaching client from my email newsletters. But I will tell you that it wasn't always that way. So for years I followed the standard advice which was send out a weekly newsletter email promoting my content, my main form of content. For me, that's mostly my podcast episodes with a single call to action. So I was doing that, I was sending it out, but that approach wasn't delivering results for me. I wasn't getting income from those emails. Sure, was I nurturing my audience? Yes, I would say I was definitely do that. I was staying on top of their mind, which is very important. But I wasn't seeing the return on investment from my weekly newsletter sins. In fact, I actually, if I'm being honest, I dreaded sending them out and I knew I was doing something wrong, but I wasn't quite sure what it was. I had also signed up for some email marketing memberships, you know that, you know, they give you the content or you know, prompts or whatever, but that really wasn't helping me with the right content or the right strategy for my newsletter. And I know, I know I'm not the only one who has struggled with this issue. And a lot of you can probably relate to this. You're probably sending out your weekly email newsletters, you're sending them out, but you're just not getting any sales from them. You're not getting any business from them. And you're probably even questioning is it worth your time. So what I did was I put on my university marketing professor hat and I decided to conduct a research study to uncover what those best in class email newsletter operators were doing that all of us in this creator niche had not mastered. Yet I also pulled data and info from some newsletters that I personally loved and looked forward to getting them every single week and studied them and looked at them and, you know, tried to figure out what was it about them that made them special to me. And this was a six month research study. I started it back in 2023 and based on my research findings, I developed and implemented my newsletter profit system, which I am sharing now with you in the newsletter profit club. But I really want to talk about in the podcast episode today some of the things that I found in this six month research study and what I started to do as I started going through this research study. And if you've been on my email list, you may have noticed some of these changes or you may have not because they didn't happen overnight, right? I tested things out, I tweaked things here and there. I made this little tweak or this little tweak and I kept improving until I started seeing my return on my investment go up. I started making money from every single newsletter that was going out. I started getting new content, coaching clients from, even if I wasn't mentioning my coaching in that particular newsletter, I was getting people signing up and clicking on that little thing at the bottom, you know, if you want to work with me type thing. And I got people responding back to my email saying, yours is one of the few newsletters that I actually read and save in a special Gmail folder. And when I started getting that type of feedback, I knew I was onto something. So I started getting that feedback. I started actually seeing the difference in my email stats and also seeing the difference in my bank account. So one of the things that I found in this research study is that many newsletters in our niche, in this creator niche, which is a broad niche, they were really falling short by offering just one piece of content or one call to action. And I, I would say this is one of the top mistakes that I'm seeing people made. And quite frankly, I was making this myself because that's what I was told to do, basically, you know, nurture your audience with your one piece of content. Your, you know, for me it was my podcast content, you know, and point them with that call to action to go listen to your podcast episode. So that's what I was doing. The other thing I would say if, in your emails, if you are solely driving traffic to your website like I was doing, I might, you know, might be sending them to my website or go listen here on Apple Podcast or Spotify or whatever you're not really sending newsletters. So what I found in this particular study is that those would be considered marketing emails, right? So we're talking about weekly email newsletters here. And I want to make an important point of clarification is let's say that you're doing a flash sale, or let's say that you are doing a course launch where you're driving people to a webinar. You're going to want that one call to action there because you want them to take that action to take action on that flight flash sale, or to take action to sign up for that webinar. Your newsletter is different. I want you to think of your newsletter like a newspaper or a magazine. So if you're my age, you may remember back to when you're in high school and you had the Cosmopolitan magazine and you would like, save it and you would read it over and over and you would fold over or bookmark a page or, or an article or a quiz or something that you absolutely loved in your magazine. You would go back and share it with your friends. So you want to think of your newsletter like that because newsletters are the new newspapers, newsletters are the new magazines. So with that being the case, you want your newsletter to deliver multiple pieces of content in each issue. And this could be a variety of different things. And that's one of the things that I cover in the newsletter. Profit Club is helping you figure out what are your categories, what are you going to include in your newsletter. And right from the beginning, you're going to start testing things out. You're going to explore different things, like I did. I've done that over the past few months. You could be like, you could do articles or stories or curated content, right? It doesn't always have to be content that you're creating by yourself. You could pull something in that somebody else has done and highlight that because you think your audience would be interested in it. You can include images and infographics. I definitely includes those in my email newsletters. You can include games and quizzes. People love games and quizzes. And I've actually started doing something that. Something like that. And maybe even adding a riddle in here or there. Just fun stuff. I call it Easter eggs, right? These little, you know, surprises that you put in your email newsletter just to make people smile or, you know, just to get them thinking. You could do an interview section or an advice column. So think about it. If you're a relationship coach, you could have an advice column in your weekly newsletter. How cool would that be? People would love, love, love that you could do customer profiles or reader reviews or reader feedback. There's just so much, so much you can do with these email newsletters and the various categories that you can have in there to make them interesting and engaging to your readership. So the other thing I want you to remember is that by offering three to five pieces of different content, you are letting your readers pick and choose what interests them the most. So keep in mind that if your newsletter only delivers, like, one piece of content, like what I did for years, like my latest podcast episode, it might not appeal to everyone. So one of the recent podcast episodes I did, I had somebody on and we talked about Shopify. Are some people in my audience interested in selling digital products on Shopify? Absolutely. Absolutely. But not everybody. So if somebody got that email and that was the only thing I was talking about in that email newsletter, they might just unsubscribe and say, you know what? She's not speaking to me. So this is not for me. This is not something I'm interested in. But if you include three to five different pieces of content, there's a really good chance that at least one of them are going to resonate with each reader. So by diversifying your content, that makes your email newsletter so much more valuable, so much more engaging, and it really, it turns it into something that your audience looks forward to reading. So I want you to start mixing things up, and I think this one simple change will make a ton of difference in your weekly email newsletters. The other thing that I just want to point out, when you have those different categories and you have to figure out what makes the most sense for your business and your audience, but when you have those different categories, you can start adding, like, a product in there that you want to promote or. Or an affiliate offer or maybe even something from one of your sponsors. Like, for instance, in one of the recent hobby school email newsletters that I did, I had a podcast episode section. I had a featured product section where we're pointing people back to our Shopify store where they can. We're basically doing a flash sale on that particular product. We had a creative prompt section, which was, you know, something that was really cool just to create a prompt for them. And we also have our. In our community section in our hobby school newsletter. And basically that's a prompt where we point them back to have a conversation in our hobby school Facebook group. So it promotes that kind of. It promotes that community aspect. So in the email newsletter, we're pointing them to the Facebook groups we can have conversations and members in our audience can have conversations with others. So you can kind of see the different sections that I have in that email newsletter and I will include a link to both of my email newsletters, my creators MBA one and my Hobby School one just so that you can see some of the different sections that we have and how we are incorporating different ways to actually make money and profit from these weekly email newsletters. So I knew that I was on the right track with these changes that I was making in my weekly newsletter when my email engagement stats started to increase. Whether it was my open rates or my email responses that I was getting back, what really increased was our click through rates. Those especially went up and I also had people contacting me and telling me how much that they love, love, loved our weekly newsletter and that saving it in a special gmail folder for future reference. Now that is what you want to hear. Now if you go to destinycop.com profit and I'll have the link for that in the Show Notes you are going to find the information about the newsletter Profit Club where I will help you make money every time you hit publish. Now in this club, in addition to the monthly drop where we have writing prompts for your weekly email newsletter, I will help you publish your newsletter consistently. I will also allow you to steal my newsletter ideation and content planning system. So I have a very specific system that I use to come up with ideas for our weekly newsletter and and how I plan it out. It's actually my content planner, my promotional planner in my newsletter planner all in one. So I'm giving you that in this particular membership we're also giving you newsletter designs that you can imitate because that's very important how you actually set up your newsletter and all those different categories that you select, we go through and help you do that. And because I know how important it is to grow your newsletter, a major emphasis in this membership is on newsletter growth. But what is also, I think so cool about this particular membership is that I'm going to be taking you behind the scenes as I grow a newsletter business from scratch. From zero emails subscribers. I have none in there right now. I haven't even. So I'm going to take you behind the scenes on this. There's no lead magnet today, no newsletter landing page. I have absolutely nothing built. But you're going to see behind all the you're going to get behind the scenes as I grow, set up and grow this newsletter business. And also for a limited time, what I'm offering for our yearly subscribers is that you can submit your newsletter for an expert review. So I can review your newsletter? Opt in landing page your newsletter thank you Page your newsletter welcome email and a couple of newsletter issues from your archive. So go to destinycop.com profit check it out. If you have any questions whatsoever, let me know. I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you have, and I cannot wait to help you make money every time you publish. Bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show I you enjoyed hope I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.