192: Make Money Every Time You Hit Send (without burning out your list)

Foreign hi there. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my digital product Accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply. I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. 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 before we jump into today's episode, I just want to let you know that this particular episode is from a training I did for a mastermind. Now I mentioned in this episode two gifts and I want to make sure that you have access to them. The first is my newsletter profit calculator. So if you take or sign up for this calculator it will help you figure out how much money you can make from each newsletter you send out. So based on the concepts that we're talking about today and some of the monetization strategies for our newsletter, you can start thinking about, oh, this is another way I can make money from my newsletter or I could be doing this with my newsletter and make money from it. So definitely grab that calculator. It's actually a Google sheet and I'll help you figure out how much money you can make from each newsletter sent. The other gift I have for you, which I talk, I talk about. Also in this particular training is my newsletter Profit Club collaboration app. Now I put together this app for all of you so you can get together and grow your audience together and grow your newsletter together. So basically what you do, you just sign up, get access to the app, input your newsletter information, all about your newsletter and your perfect collaboration partner and then Start reaching out to people whose audiences would be perfect for your newsletter. To get that or sign up for the newsletter Profit Club collaboration app, go to destinycop.comcollab and I will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes and I hope you enjoy this episode. So again, thank you so much for having me. I am super excited to be here today and talking about a subject that I am truly passionate about and it is making money every time you hit send with your newsletter without burning out your list. And I'll walk you through kind of the history here and how I got very kind of involved in this topic and doing a research study, a six month research study all about this, that newsletter into a profit machine. And I do want to clarify that. One of the things that I want to be clear up front, I'm talking about your newsletter that you send out to your audience. So the weekly communication that you're having with them to really nurture them. I'm going to go through kind of what I found during the study and what I've been doing and some of the things I've tested. But this newsletter can bring in money. I'm not talking about in this training. I'm not talking about any launch emails that you're sending or maybe even any flash sales. You should still absolutely be doing those in your business. But you also need to be sending out that weekly at a minimum. In my opinion, that weekly newsletter, some people send them out more often than that, but that's what I am focused on and that's what I'm going to be talking about. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp. I'm a college marketing professor, turn online entrepreneur and I'm a certified business growth coach for digital product entrepreneurs. So people who either have or want to have digital products like online courses, memberships, group coaching programs with an online course, or even low cost digital products, I do focus on that quite a bit also and I still teach at the college marketing level, at the university level, in graduate and doctoral programs. I'm teaching like a strategic marketing class this fall and SEO and SEM course. So I still do that because I love teaching. I'm also the host of the Creators MBA podcast. So if you're a podcast listener, definitely check that out and also have another podcast for my hobby school brand, which I'll talk about a little bit more in just a second. But also I'll talk about some of the things that we've been doing in all the newsletters that we're running. I have four different newsletters that I run. I have my personal brand, which is my destiny, cop.com which is what I'm doing this presentation under. I have hobby school where we do online learning virtual summits in different types of hobbies and niches. I also have a Shopify store there too. And I have my newsletter profit club which we have a collaboration app just so business owners can get together, collaborate, maybe share freebies, maybe share newsletter links so they can all grow together. You can reach me on most social media platforms. I'm Most active on LinkedIn. But the best way to get all of these really good tips, these juicy tips that I send out every single week related to digital products and growing your digital product business is my creator's NBA newsletter. Now let me talk about what you're going to leave here today, what we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to walk you through the problem that I had which led me to this research study and this journey that I took related to making my newsletter this profit powerhouse. What I found in this research study and there were some major surprises there for me. Now keep in mind, I have been in in marketing, corporate marketing, teaching at the university level, running my own businesses for close to 30 years. I know a few things or more about marketing. I did find a lot of very kind of aha's and I'm like, okay, that makes sense what they're doing there. I can't believe I didn't know that I went through this research study. I'm going to walk you through some monetization strategies for your newsletter that aren't going to burn out your list. They're not going to be super salesy. You're not going to feel like you're selling every single week. And then I'm going to walk you through some newsletter design principles and how it solves the issue of burning out your list because they think you're selling to them too much. This newsletter design strategy that I've come up with based on the research study results definitely solves that issue. So I'm going to walk you through now. I am giving away free lifetime access for this collaboration app. I actually put it together and developed this app for my newsletter Profit Club. But I know for it to be super valuable for everybody involved, we need people using it. So we need people who have active newsletters and want to grow their newsletter with their ideal customer. We want them using this. So when you submit your newsletter to this, you can just input different information about your newsletter, like the niche that you're in the category that you're in just other things about your newsletter and you can also go in there and search for other people like you. So let's say that you are a coach who kind of works in the weight loss health type industry. You can go in and look for other newsletters that might have people who are your ideal customer and your ideal reader. You can reach out to them and say can we collaborate? Can we, you know, maybe swap a free gift or you know, can you send on my newsletter link and you can have a landing page for your newsletter. So there's a lot of collaboration that you can do there and you could do that for free. It's a really great way to grow your list for free. If you want to kind of calculate if you would how you can or what you can expect to make from sending out your newsletter, I have a calculator for you and you can go to this link and grab it and it will kind of, it'll walk you through what you can expect there. Now really I want to take this opportunity and set the stage for you. So now what I wanted to do was take a second and set the stage for you. I want to talk to you a little bit about the problem that I had and what I, you know, I'm going to walk you through how I went to resolve it. So for years, you know, when I first started my online business I was, you know, took took some of these courses about list growth and how do you do this? Because I came from corporate America and cor a big corporate America. In my job in corporate America, I was managing a product Portfol of $800 million, so almost a billion dollars when I went into university teaching. Eventually I started my own business. A lot of the marketing principles that I learned over the years was very different. So I was used to more corporate marketing. But this is different. What we're doing in these niche small businesses, mostly solopreneur businesses, it's a different marketing strategy. So I'm focused on growing my email list. You know, I've taken some courses. So I was following all the standard advice that I was given. And basically what that standard advice was, it was create one kind of pillar piece of content, send it out to your email list on a weekly basis, providing them value and nurturing them. And when you're ready to launch, basically they're going to be ready to buy from you because you've been interacting with them on a regular basis. You've been giving them valuable information. But what I found was that advice was not working for me. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be doing that pillar piece of content providing value to your audience, but let's take a second and think a little bit more about human behavior. And I kind of put myself in my ideal reader shoes, my ideal customer shoes. And I know that there's emails that I get from people that I love and I've followed for years and they're sending these emails out to me on a regular basis. So they're doing a really good job there. But I know that that email that's coming into my inbox is basically talking about their new podcast episode that they just launched. So what was happening, I would see that email, I wouldn't even open it because I know that that podcast episode is in my podcast app. And when I'm ready to listen to it like I do when maybe when I'm working out, maybe when I'm walking my dog, maybe it's when I drive into the grocery store, I know that that's when I'm going to do that. So I really wasn't opening those emails. They had great podcast show notes that go along with them, but there wasn't really any burning kind of reason for me to open that email. An issue, and that was happening to me. I was doing all the right things, I was giving my audience some valuable information, but it just was, it wasn't like helping, wasn't moving the needle. So I was like, you know what, that's not working. That's not delivering results. The other issue that I had is I had digital products, coaching services, I had a lot of other stuff that I needed to sell on a regular basis that I didn't want to wait for a launch to promote them. So affiliate offers, I knew that they were valuable to my audience and I wanted to promote them. So I didn't want to be always sending out an email to my audience saying buy this and buy this and buy this. I had a dilemma that I was trying to solve. So basically what I did, I'm like, this isn't working. I know there's a better way to do this. I searched for a lot of solutions, didn't find them out there in the marketplace. And I'm like, you know what, I'm going to put my marketing professor hat on and I'm going to conduct a research study. So basically what I did was I conducted a six month research study to uncover what I identified as these best in class email newsletter businesses that we in this creator digital Creator coaching niche hadn't mastered yet. Based on what I found in this research study, I implemented my newsletter profit system. One of the key learnings was that these newsletter operators were treating their newsletters like a standalone product. I was not doing that. I considered my email list and my newsletter like a marketing channel. I was distributing information from this email list to my audience. Their newsletters were so valuable and packed full of information that that particular piece of content, if you would, or that product could stand on its own even if they didn't have a website or any other content platform. This was a huge mind shift for me. The other thing was I found these newsletter businesses that had sold for millions of dollars. So I'm like, okay, so they're doing something different there. And you can go to that particular website that I have here, deuce.com and just kind of get a feel for some of these newsletters that have. And if you want to get, you know, you can get on some of their email lists too and kind of see what they're doing there. But I was like, okay, holy cow, you know, they're doing something different here. Then I started thinking, okay, how can I apply what they're doing to my brands and businesses and what do I need to change? Because clearly what I'm doing is not working and it's, you know, vastly different from what they're doing there. So here are some other things that I found. The successful newsletters were consistent. They were sending out a minimum of once per week. And you're going to say, destiny, that's no surprise to me and I agree with you, that wasn't a surprise to me. Now, some of them do more, right? Some of them send out daily, some of them do twice per week. I didn't find anyone, any newsletter in this particular study that was doing a minimum of once per week. So it wasn't like a once per month or every other week. I think all of them were at least once per week. The other thing I found in the study is they had a structured, easy to read format that they pretty much stuck to in every newsletter that they sent out. They may have tweaked it here and there based on reader feedback, but it was a pretty consistent format that they stuck to. The other thing that I found was they were monetizing their newsletter in a variety of weeks, some ways that I didn't even know existed out there. Even though I had seen them in some newsletters I've gotten over time, I wasn't paying much attention. But when I started Digging into the details, I'm like, okay, this is why they're successful. So it was a huge aha from me. But the biggest takeaway that I found throughout the study, and I think it's probably one of the main reasons, quite frankly, that these newsletters are successful, is that they were providing valuable content that their readers couldn't wait to open. And in a lot of cases, this was content that you couldn't get anywhere else. You had to be on their newsletter to get it. It wasn't content that they were simply redistributing from their podcast platform. HubSpot stopped sending people from their newsletter to their YouTube channel. And it kind of goes back, this whole research study goes back to what I talked about earlier. You have to think about the reader and when they're reading your newsletter, what state of mind are they in? They're not normally going to go from reading your newsletter to another platform, like watching a video and spending 15 to 30 minutes watching a video, or they're not going to go from your newsletter and go to your podcast platform. That's not human behavior. So what HubSpot found in this research study, when they stopped sending people to their YouTube channel from their email newsletter, their YouTube channel grew and they just kind of let YouTube do its thing. And the results were crazy. I think it grew like 400% during this time that they stopped sending people. Those people were going there basically, you know, watching for like a second and leaving. So it wasn't letting YouTube kind of and the algorithm there do its thing. So you really have to think about when somebody's reading a newsletter what their behavior is. And their behavior is they're reading, right? They want that content in that newsletter, so they want that valuable content there. The other thing I found in this research study is that you can be successful with different formats. I found in the study all kinds of things. They were doing long newsletters, they were doing short newsletters. There are some newsletters out there, they call them minimalistic newsletters where basically there's like three bullet points, three different links, and you know, go here to read this and basically they're sending people to other content. And people, you know, they're successful with that. There's medium sized newsletter and like I said, I have four of them that I sent out on a regular weekly basis. I tested out the long, I've tested out the shorter ones. And my newsletters, you know, generally are going to fall into five minutes or less. And I would put that in the medium sized newsletters and really the key what I found is to pick a format and structure that works for you and it works for your readers and kind of go with it. That's your brand. You're kind of putting it's again, you're branding your newsletter. You might even be, you know, putting a name related to your newsletter, like some of my newsletters or my personal brand newsletters called the Creators MBA Newsletter. Right. So I tied it into my podcast, which is my Creators MBA podcast. I have a certain kind of color scheme that I use. Hey there Destiny here. And I'm the host of the Creators MBA Podcast. And this episode is brought to you by HelloContent Shop, your go to destination for content creation creation in your online digital product business. I understand how busy you are as an online business owner. I am right there with you. And that is why I have filled our hello Content Shopify store with low cost digital products that you can use as a lead magnet or part of your paid programs like your online courses or memberships. We also have marketing templates like email swipe files and social media templates designed to save you time and money. So whether you're looking to streamline your content strategy, enhance your digital products, or just save some precious time, I've got you covered, my friend. Now visit the hello Content Shop today and take the first step towards effortless content creation. Just a format and structure that I use on a consistent basis doesn't mean that I might tweak it here and there. In fact, this past week I did something a little bit different because I wanted to survey my audience. Okay, so now let's move into and talk about monetization because this was a big aha for me. As I went through this, I found like these newsletter, I'll call them newsletter operators, newsletter businesses. They were focused on monetization. So they're selling what was interesting too, a lot of these newsletters, they might be selling like done for you type services. You know, like a data type newsletter might go in and build out somebody's data and tracking system or they might have like a membership or an online course or coaching or whatever. So they're selling kind of their core products and services through this newsletter, but they're doing a lot of other things. That is certainly not the only thing that they're selling in that newsletter. So what they're doing is they're selling these sponsorships. One might be like a single sponsor for an issue. The sponsor might take over that entire newsletter. You could have like dedicated sections or multiple mentions throughout this newsletter. To help people, you know, learned how to use calligraphy. But basically we sent out an entire list email driving people to one of the webinars or trainings that they were doing and then they were going to promote their membership there. So they paid us to send that out to our entire hobby school list. Another example here is I've had sponsors take over or have dedicated sections or multiple mentions. Like this past week with Hobbit School I had somebody on the podcast and I included information for her like in our creative section, kind of expanding on some of the points that she made in the podcast and also had a feature product for her. So that was another example of how we do those single sponsored issues. Now you can also do display ads. A lot of the newsletters, a lot of them actually in the study idea they do display ads. So these are kind of banner style ads that are placed throughout or within the newsletter content is pretty evident. That is an ad going back to the one I talked about earlier with hobby school where I had that VIP sponsor. We did a podcast episode with her, a featured product and then section in the Get Creative. Those were more integrated than the newsletter. Even though we told people that she was one of our VIP sponsors and we let them know that she was a sponsor, it didn't feel very salesy because all of that was integrated natively. If you would throughout our newsletter content, you can do native content. Speaking of which, you can do like sponsored articles or sections that match the style of your regular content. You could have sponsored section. So that's another way you can do it. If you start paying attention to a lot of these newsletters, you'll see that a lot of people, especially the bigger type of newsletters are doing that. The other thing that they're doing is product reviews or showcases. They're going into details about a specific product and either that sponsor has paid them to do that or maybe they're getting some type of affiliate commission. But in most cases that particular sponsor has paid them to do that in depth review. You could do classified listings. These would be short text ads like go here, go here, go here. You could do exclusive deals or offers. The reason why I love this is that these are special discounts or promotions for your readers that they, you know that they're absolutely going to love. You can do also like a sponsored series. So I saw a lot of these where they were doing multi issue sponsorships around a particular theme or topic. And the last one I've done a lot myself, especially in hobby school is co created content you collaborate with your sponsors to create very valuable content for your audience. And I've done that a lot with the podcast episodes. The next thing that I saw a lot in this research study, and this is probably not going to be a surprise to any of you who are, you know, listening to this, is affiliate marketing. So a lot of times you'll see people like promoting an event. So they might have an event section in their newsletter and they might be getting paid some type of an affiliate marketing fee to promote that event. You can promote and digital product or service. Again, in a lot of my newsletters I have a featured product section and that's where I either promote some of my own personal products or I might be promoting somebody else's. And that's a very kind of non salesy way to get that in there. And apps or tools were also very popular for affiliate marketing in this particular research study. Now in terms of the other things that I saw them promoting in ways that they were monetizing these newsletters, digital products, ebooks, courses, memberships, templates, coaching, newsletter businesses, they're still promoting some of this coaching, consulting and other services that they have. So they're doing it just like all of us. Events, the webinar, the workshops, in person events. The other thing that I found very interesting, and I actually signed up for some of these in this research study just to see how they were doing it. Some of them had paid newsletter subscriptions. So basically what they were doing, they were offering premium content for recurring fee. And the ones that I joined and kind of checked out to see what they were doing there, it was super valuable because I could see why for some niches out there, you know, that is a really good option is to have a free newsletter. Okay, so let's talk about what I designed for my newsletters based on those research results and really how this helps you kind of integrate all of those monetization opportunities into your weekly newsletter. Okay, so here's what I want you to think about. And I'm going to be probably dating myself a little bit here, but I want you to think about when you were back in high school school and when your favorite magazine was scheduled to come into your mailbox. Now for me, it was Cosmo, Cosmopolitan. I used to love getting that magazine. I would run out to the mailbox, I would get it, I would open it up, read it, I would dog eared some pages, I would go back to it. There was so much in there that I liked and of course there was some stuff in there I didn't pay much attention to. So that's what I want you to think about. That is the experience that you want to create for your readers. You want them every single week when they're getting your email newsletter in their inbox. You want them thinking, okay, first of all, I gotta open it because I know there's valuable content in here that I can apply to my life. I can apply to my business right away. So you want them to see your name, open it, and then you want them to kind of go through it, figure out exactly what sections in there they're interested in. And then if there's something super interesting in there that grabs their eye or grabs their attention, they're like, oh my gosh, I love this. I don't want to lose this. I want to save this in a separate, you know, special Gmail folder so I can go back to it and maybe even reference it at some point in the future. That is what you want to kind of. That's the experience, I should say, that you want to create here. So here's what it looks like. Here's what I call your newsletter magazine. And it's basically three to five different pieces of content in each newsletter. And the reason why I like is that you're giving your readers option. If one section doesn't appeal to them, another might catch their interest. I can tell you that. And I've just surveyed my audience for my creators MBA newsletter. I have a wide variety of different kind of businesses, different kind of needs. They're all over the place in terms of where they are in their business journey. And there it is not a one size fits all for sure. So when you are kind of, you know, giving them different pieces of content, people are going to go in there and they're like, oh, this, I love this. This applies to me. She's speaking or he's speaking directly to me. And some of it they just might skip over. They're like, okay, I get it. But you know, not kind of where I am right now, I've already passed that stage or I'm not through that stage yet. So that's definitely going to happen. So that's why I love this newsletter magazine approach. And if you go out and in this research study, most of the I would say kind of larger newsletter kind of businesses, they had this kind of approach. But like I said, there were other kind of newsletter structures out there. I talked about that minimalistic one. You know, a lot of times with that they're sending something out every day and it's Just three bullet points. So that's a little bit different strategy. All of them work as you know. But this is the one that I felt like for our digital creator and coaching niche that we are in, this seemed to be the one that I felt like was the best one. It allows you to seamlessly integrate those monetization elements. Different ways that you can bring in sponsors, different ways that you can promote affiliate products, different ways that you can promote our coaching services, our ebooks, our memberships, our courses, all the stuff that we're promoting. We may not be in a launch, but we want to make sure that we're getting an ROI on sending out this newsletter that we're spending all of this time putting together and sending out to our audience. We want to make sure that we're monetizing it. I don't want to spend all this time doing my podcast and putting together my newsletter content and not make money from it. That's, you know, we're not for the most of us, I would assume we're not running non profits here. We're doing this to make money. We have bills to pay. I have two more kids to put through college. Right. We want to make money from our newsletter. What I found from this newsletter magazine approach, it allowed me to kind of slot in either side sponsors or slot in feature products or slot in, you know, affiliate stuff. And it just felt natural to me. Right? It was a natural way for me to serve my audience. I wasn't feeling pushy, I was more providing value and oh, by the way, you can get this to accomplish this type thing. So what I did was I took this kind of newsletter magazine apparently approach and started implementing it. It wasn't perfect in the beginning. If you go back and look at some of my early stage newsletters, you'll see how some of it involved. But here's some of the things that I was measuring to determine my success here. I was looking at open rates, I was looking at click through rates. Click through rates were very important to me. Not only click through rates, because you're basically driving traffic maybe to a product that you're offering or your coaching also for sponsors, that's the number one thing that they're interested in. So they want to know how many clicks that they're going to get. So like when I sent out that newsletter for hobby school, for the calligraphy business that I mentioned, they're interested in, how many clicks am I going to drive to their webinar page? Sign up because they know, let's say their webinar page is converting at, you know, 50%. So for sake of argument here, they know if I send them 100 clicks, they know that they're going to get 50 signups and they know how much that they can pay or they're willing to pay for those 50 signups. So clicks are very important for sponsors, as you can imagine. So people who are replying back to your email and just direct feedback. So what hap. What was happening? When I started implementing this newsletter magazine system, people started responding back to me and they're like, I love your content. I love getting your newsletter every single week. I'm saving it to a special Gmail folder because people started responding back and say, I'm saving your emails to a special folder in my email service provider because I love them so much and I go back and reference them. That's when I knew, okay, I'm onto something. This is working for me. I'm starting to make money from this. It didn't all happen overnight and it's not going to happen overnight for you for sure. It definitely changed my thought process about my email newsletter and I felt good about sending it out rather than dreading it because previously I dreaded it so much. I wasn't consistent. We know how important consistency is here. And then of course, sales are conversions. So the sales that you're seeing, maybe from your affiliate products, maybe from your coaching services that you're promoting, etc. Okay, so now I want to go into a little bit more about newsletter design mistakes to avoid. So we've talked about this magazine kind of approach system, so let's talk about some things to avoid here. The first thing that you want to avoid is content that's, that's not designed for email. So you want it to be very concise, skimmable, you want it to be useful content. And I like to do these five minute or less newsletters. I found based on kind of the testing that I did, the five minutes or less worked for me. We know that people are super, super busy. The other mistake I found that people were making, and obviously I was making, they were only delivering one type of content. So I want you to think of your newsletter like a newspaper magazine and offer three to five different pieces of content. I like to do around five and that's typically what I will do in my newsletters. You want your email to be skimmable, so you want to have these sections in there. You want it to have basically kind of like a newspaper magazine. I mean, it's the same thing. You Want people to be able to look at it, skim it, get exactly what they need, what that key takeaway is and kind of move on throughout their day, take action and then move on.

Destiny. We have a couple of questions that have come in. Do you recommend doing a paid newsletter?

I think there are definitely opportunities out there for paid newsletters. I recommend having a free newsletter and then if you want to have some type of premium content for people who want to take that kind of to the next level, then you can absolutely do that. I'll give you some examples of some paid newsletters that I have seen that have been successful. One of them is for basically what he does. He helps people with SaaS startups. So his news is kind of free content newsletter. He gives them information about that. But then he has a, a premium one that has a community around it and you can also ask him questions. So he's doing I think the premium community in WhatsApp so you can go in and ask him questions. But he also sends out premium content for those SaaS newsletter operators that he doesn't provide in his free newsletter. The other one that I've actually been in this particular hey newsletter in the past, she's a copywriter and she sends, I mean her, the email that she sends out on a regular basis is fantastic. But her paid newsletter is a little bit different. Her paid newsletter, she's giving you like copy templates that you can use email subject lines just or headlines that you can use like on a sales page, fantastic content. So those are two examples. One would be for somebody who is in basically what she's doing is like tarot card type stuff and readings and then she has a paid newsletter where she does more horoscopes for you daily type stuff. So I definitely think that there's opportunities out there for the freed and the paid option. If you're going to do a paid newsletter, I still think you need that free newsletter. And then there's going to be a certain portion of your email newsletter subscribers that will opt in for the paid content. Thanks for the question.

Did you create a sponsorship guide for brands that might want to support your newsletter? And can you talk about how to figure out pricing for sponsors?

So I do have one of those in my newsletter, Profit club. It's something that I actually just launched that this week. So it's basically something that people can put together and they can outline what they're offering for sponsors in terms of pricing. A lot of it does come down to your click through rates because what are Sponsors going to be interested in, they're going to be interested in the traffic that you're sending to them. Right? So they're, you know, we're kind of past this awareness. They want to know how many people are you going to send to their landing page. So let's say that they are promoting a webinar or maybe they're promoting a free gift, or maybe they're promoting a free sign up for an app or tool or something like that. They want to know how many clicks are you going to get on that. So in terms of pricing, you have to look at it on a case by case basis. And the niche, that's a B2C niche, the pricing for something like that is going to be vastly different than somebody who helps, you know, SaaS, business owners. Going back to my previous examples, you need to know how much are they willing to pay basically for those 50 signups? So let's say that they're willing to pay $2 a lead. Okay, so basically $100 for that. They're willing to pay a hundred dollars for that, that, that. Then you know, if you have a section in your newsletter, they're willing to pay $2 a lead. Then, you know, you get 50 clicks, you'll know how much to charge for them.

Wonderful. Thank you. Should we think of the newsletter content like blog posts? And can you please remind me of the ideal length of these posts?

So that's a really good question. You're not putting a full blog post in your email newsletter. When people are reading your newsletter, they're basically reading. So you can link to a blog post like on your website from your email newsletter and it kind of continues that typical human behavior. So when I am consulting or working with clients on this and they're like, okay, I'm a blogger, I want to link to my blog post. I'm like, perfect, you know, you're continuing that behavior. So what I would do in that case, if you were wanting to link to a blog coach, I would kind of tease the content and then you can link to it. What I don't recommend, let's say you have these three sections in your email newsletter. I wouldn't put a thousand word blog post in your email newsletter in one of your sections. I think that's too much. I think you need more concise information to give them some quick tips. And again, sometimes you have to test it out to see what works for you and your audience. But generally I like to keep these newsletters five minutes or less. So think about that when you're putting it together. I'm going to jump in here. Another mistake I see people making is they have, you know, basically a lack of color, lack of images and personalities. So when you're putting together your newsletter design, you want to think about your brand. You want to think about, you know, when people think about your brand, what are they thinking about? If you go to my creator's MBA newsletter, a lot of times I'll have like images in there that kind of, they all of them correspond with the brand and kind of the images that I have on my website, maybe on my blog post or my podcast episode. So you'll want to use your brand's primary color very consistently there. You'll want to use relevant images to kind of complement your content. So I like to have the images in there so you're not having just straight text in your email newsletter. And also because your comfort, your personality, make sure your personal personality comes out. I like to write in a conversational tone just like I'm talking to a friend. So you know, and I sometimes I'll use AI to how to help me with this. But then I have to go back and edit it just to make sure that it's using my own personality. There's. I want to give you a design checklist and some specific examples that you can look at. So you might want to. And I know a lot of you might have a name for your newsletter so you can put that logo up there. I've given you a couple of examples here for my creators, MBA one and what we're doing in hobby school. So in hobby school I have the logo there and then kind of our tagline where creative passions become life changing journeys. And I try to communicate that basically that's what's communicated on our website. So I'm also bringing that kind of branding into my newsletter for that consistency. The other thing and this kind of gives you what the layout might look like. And I actually kind of stole this from the Morning Brews newsletter layout. And there's a lot of newsletter businesses out there that use a very small similar type of layout here. But I like to have that little headline, that little headline there where it says new episode. That's one of my newsletter sections. So I have in this particular newsletter the creators, mba. I have new episode, upcoming events and workshops, featured product, quick tips and bookmark worthy. So those are the five sections that I have in this particular newsletter in the hobby school. One's a little bit different but you can kind of see what it looks like There now, a lot of times what I've started to do now is I'll just have the new episode and then underneath it I'll have the picture of what I'm using for that particular blog post. The other thing you'll want to have is kind of either box up your sections again. We're going to make it super easy for people to skim. You can have this dividers in there, you can have white space in there. You can see here in the hobby school one, I have a custom image divider in there that's between like the podcast episode one and the upcoming works, upcoming workshops and events. In my creator's MBA one, I'll just use kind of either the boxes or some type of dividers. And most of your email service providers are going to have ways for you to set this up also, like just including a picture of you. I would love for all of you to have a picture of you, your name in there, letting people know your title, what you do, basically how you can help them. I do this with hobby school also. Even though it's not a personal brand for me, emails that come from people, they're not going to want an email that comes from hobby school school, like this general brand out there, they want emails that come out from me. So in my email service provider, I have even the emails coming out from hobby school, they're coming out from my name. So I have like destiny and I have a little slash there and I have hobby school. So when they see that showing up on their phone, they're going to see my name, they're going to see hobby school there too, but they're going to see my name because people want emails that come from people. And this is actually when I did the research study, this is actually one of the biggest challenges. A lot of these bigger newsletter operators and these bigger like e commerce people really struggle with this is because, you know, it's a larger company. But people want emails coming out from people, so they're trying to, they're even trying to do that in their business also. You know, think about your colors, your fonts, your design. Definitely black text and a white background is the most eligible. I, I would say that overall simple is better. And I've changed some of this over time, even for me because I'm still continuing to test it, to tweak it, to see what's working. But for the most part I'm using kind of those, the colors that stand out. The other thing that I've come, especially in my hobby school because the readers for that, just because of the nature of what we're doing there, a lot of them are retired, so they have trouble reading. And this is something I've recently kind of found out about because we're doing a lot more things to make everything more accessible to them. So we're definitely changing some things there. But we try to make sure that everything is accessible to everybody. Links. You want to make sure that your links can stand out, can be a bold color, definitely. You want people know when they see that particular section in your website, you want them to know, okay, I can click there and it's going to go to the website or it's going to go to Apple Podcast or whatever. So width and columns. So one thing that I would suggest that you do is always test out what you're doing on mobile and be very, very careful of bullet points. Because if you use bullet points on mobile, especially if you go more than one level, so let's say you have one bullet point and you have bullet points underneath that, they're not going to read correctly on mobile. So I've actually stopped doing that. I will have bullet points, but just one level of bullet points. And just, you know, every time you send something out, view it on desktop, view it on mobile, make sure it's skimmable, make sure it's readable. And then, you know, we talked about this earlier. If you haven't grabbed your lifetime access to the newsletter, Profit Club collaboration app, definitely jump in there, get that destiny cop.com forward/collab. Super easy to remember. And then I want you to grab your newsletter so you can, you know, look at all the monetization topics that we talked about today. And there was. There's tons of them. Right. And I want you to kind of go in, use this calculator and figure out the amount you can expect to see over time when you're sending out your newsletters. Wonderful. So just to kind of wrap it up, I want to give you some next steps and things to start thinking about. And the first thing is to start thinking about the different ways you want to monetize your newsletter. We are spending a ton of time creating this content, sending out this weekly newsletter, making sure that we are staying on top of mind with our audience. And that's very important. But we also want to make sure we're getting an ROI for that time. Also start a folder in your email service provider. Whenever you see a newsletter design that you like, save it. I would go and subscribe to some of the top ones the hustle, the tilt, trying to remember them all off the top of my head like Morning View, Stack Marketer. Go subscribe to some of the bigger ones out there. When I started doing this, I found some of the most ideas and inspirations when I went completely outside of my niche. So I highly, highly recommend that and then start thinking about the sections that you might want in your newsletter. How can I provide value to my readers? Like in my creator's mba, I have a quick tips section, but I also have my bookmark worthy section. That's where I really try to provide something that really makes them think, something that they're like, oh my goodness, I really love this. I know that this is going to help me, but I want to save this. So I want them to kind of bookmark that email based on the content in there. Next week we're going to start exploring some other things. We're going to go into details about your newsletter sections, maybe even naming your newsletter. I'm still working on this content, but definitely join me for next week. And you know I love to answer any questions that you have.

If you just put those links into chat, then I will make sure that everyone has access to your wonderful free gifts.

There you go. Great.

Thank you very much. I don't see any more questions at the moment, but I have a question for you, if that's okay.

Absolutely.

It looks to me that there's a lot of work to put out a newsletter in terms of finding content, putting together content, ideas, all of that stuff. So what's your perception of that?

I mean, I think that's a very valid question. And here's how I handle it. I definitely have a system, you know, that I use and that's very important. I'm also producing regular content.

So it's easy for you because you've got into the rhythm of it.

It's easy for me, yes. You know, I, I have like a system that I'm using. I'm producing rather regular content. But the other thing that I'm doing that makes, makes it easy for me is I'm interacting with my audience. You know, I might be meeting with them in my membership or in my coaching. So I know what questions they're asking me, I know what they're struggling with, and that's what I use to create the content. It's easier for me and my personal brand because it's the brand I'm so close to. Hobby school is a little bit more challenging. But, but what I've learned even there is whomever we're kind of partnering with like on the podcast or what I'm doing there, maybe some of the speakers from some of the events, I'll pull in stuff from them to promote. It's a little bit more difficult for me in hobby school because I'm just not as close to all of that. But I can still do it there because I have that system that I'm talking with you about. Got it.

So for a beginner, what would you recommend in terms of getting content, getting started on the content?

I think for a beginner, the main thing that I would be focused on initially is newsletter growth. So growing that email list. Let's say once you've started, you have your email service provider set up, you have your free gift or whatever you're doing to attract your ideal customer, start sending out that weekly newsletter. In the beginning, it doesn't have to be perfect. It may just be content that you posted on Instagram that did well, or you can repurpose it for your email newsletter and vice versa. Right. A lot of the content that I use in my email newsletter, I'll also use that content for social media. So it doesn't have to be a blog post. If maybe you're not blogging yet. They're not doing any top of pillar content yet. They're not doing blogging, podcasting, or YouTube. And if that's you, that's fine. It really comes down to how can you serve your audience. So I would just start with figuring out that what kind of questions do they have and how can you answer and help them? Great.

Thank you and thank you so much for your amazing training call today. I haven't come across this concept before, so I learned a lot and I hope everyone, everyone who's been watching has learned as well. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your interactions and we will be back same time, same place, same link next week. You'll get a replay that goes out tomorrow and get an announcement email for next week's call as well. So please do attend live if you can, because as you can see, Destiny gets to answer your questions in real time. Thank you so much and see you next time.

Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.