FASTEST Way to $10,000 a Month with a Newsletter

The numbers used in this video are estimates for an average creator business. HeyCreator insists you share more information in the comments. We will reply to them.

How can you make $10,000 a month with an email newsletter? And what's the fastest way to do it? Does it even matter how many email subscribers you have? In this video, I talk about the different ways that newsletters make money and the fastest way to make $10,000 with a newsletter. It may not be exactly what you think. I was employee number 5 at ConvertKit, and I've worked with some of the biggest and best newsletter creators in the world, including Nathan Barry, Sahil Bloom, Justin Welsh, Ryan Holiday, and many more. I've also grown my own newsletter to over 18,000 subscribers, so I've put these things into practice in my own work as well. I'm excited to share this with you because it can change everything about how you create content and build that first $10,000 month. Here we go.

Newsletters. We do so much with newsletters. We have the newsletter agency. I'm gonna kick it right to you. What is the fastest way to make $10,000 a month with a newsletter?

The fastest way to make $10,000 a month with a newsletter is by using your newsletter to promote other opportunities, courses, coaching, community that you have. That is the fastest way to earn $10,000 a month kind of through a newsletter. But earning $10,000 a month with a newsletter does take a little bit more time because the main ways that people earn directly through a newsletter. There are a few different ones. The most popular and one that you'll probably see the most are sponsorships. And so if you're talking about how can I earn $10,000 a month with newsletter sponsorships and you send a weekly newsletter, well, that math is pretty simple. We're talking about having a $2,500 sponsor slot in a weekly newsletter. That's $10,000 for a month. And now while all of these numbers can vary based on different factors, I would say based on my experience, that you need 100,000 subscribers, maybe 70,000 at minimum, to earn that kind of weekly rate for a newsletter sponsorship.

And sponsorships really are the only newsletter-specific way that your newsletter makes money. But I want to stress something here. You mentioned 100,000 subscribers to get to that number for a weekly send. You and I both know that it's really hard to get to 100,000 subscribers on your list. And maybe most people watching aren't even at 1,000 subscribers. So we talked about the combination of how the different pieces, the newsletters, coaching courses, community, any offer can combine up to $10,000 a month. But speak to how to get to those first 1,000 subscribers all the way up to 100,000 subscribers, because that's like the missing piece here. It's like it's the easy thing to say. It's a simple way to explain it. But how do we actually grow our list? To get to that number where this makes it viable to get the $10,000 a month.

It's a really great point. What I focus on here is how to get your first 10, and that may seem like a really small number when we're talking about $100,000, but who are 10 people that I can reach out to directly to subscribe to my email newsletter? And again, this may seem like very humble beginnings, but I can guarantee you that every single newsletter that's been started starts from zero. That's just the nature of it. The person that I've been following that has had the fastest path on their way to 100,000 subscribers right now is Chanel, who runs a great newsletter called Growth in Reverse. And I believe she started in December 2023. So she's been going about— no, December 2022. So she's been going about 18 months and she's gone from zero to— I think she's like 40,000, 45,000 subscribers and she's been growing pretty quickly. So that's 18 months to get halfway there. Now these things tend to compound. I don't think it'll take her another 18 months to get to 100,000, but that should give you kind of an expected timeline for getting that number of newsletter subscribers. But getting your first 10, even your first 100, is often direct outreach. And those are family, friends, uh, people that you have connected with that you might know who are interested in this thing that you're starting a business, that you're starting to create content around. And then social media is also a good place to start to get more visibility, more eyeballs. Uh, if you have a bit of a budget, you could run ads or you could do something called paid recommendations, which we'll talk about next. But getting that first 10 and to that first 100 is often a lot of grunt work. And then you can ask people like, hey, do you, do you know anybody else? You can ask for recommendations, you can ask for referrals, but it's often just like being very proactive and asking people, hey, do you want to subscribe? And saying like, this is like just talking about the newsletter more and more. That's something that I don't see people doing as much as I think they should, which is talking about their newsletter on social media, put it in the, put it in the signature of all the emails that you send. Maybe not if it's good for your work, but any personal email that you send, like put a subscribe to your newsletter link there. So there's a few different ways to go, but I will say like the first 10, the first 100, even all the way up to the first 1,000 is, is a lot of, is a lot of hard work and is a lot of direct outreach. But it does start to like grow and build faster from there.

Yeah, I would say the thing that I didn't know that I wish I knew when I started posting online is basically just plug my newsletter under almost every post that is any sort of like that pops off in any way, shape, or form. Like if 5 people like it, that's enough eyeballs to— you can see the views now on Twitter X, like how people are seeing this post, like plug your newsletter below it. I wish I would have known that your email list, growing your list does wonders for all of the other parts of your creator business and Having that, having that focus on growing your list like allows us to talk about the other things, the courses, the community, the coaching. It's just, it's just the most important like first step. I made a video on my channel like the secret first step to growing your creator business, and it really is the list.

Yeah, you make a really great point that while newsletters may not be your fastest path to $10,000 a month as a creator, it is the most important step that I think will help you get to $100,000 a year, $200,000 a year, those multiple 10-figure months. It's all powered by the newsletter. So maybe it's not the place where you make the most money directly through like sponsorships, recommendations, or even paid newsletters, which, which some people have. But it is the most important like promotional channel, connection channel that you have to your audience.

You've mentioned referrals, and that's interesting to me. I really haven't used that for my newsletter yet as like some sort of referral program or paid referrals. Tell me more about how creators like me, like you, like anyone can grow their list with recommendations?

Yeah, it's really interesting because the paid recommendations piece is something that SparkLoop and ConvertKit and Beehive have all promoted in the past year. And basically what it is— so let's take Sahil Bloom, for example, or our mutual friend Tim Grahl and his Business Story Grid. So if you choose to, like, recommend people on your list to Sahil's, to Tim's, to literally thousands of others, and those people sign up and convert, that means like they stick for more than 2 weeks. Then you're going to get paid like $2 or $3 and that adds up. So if I recommended like 100 people go to like sign up for StoryGrid or Sahil's newsletter, the Curiosity Chronicle, then I'm going to make a couple hundred dollars this month. And I could do that no matter the size of my list, no matter the number of people. So this is, this is something that I've seen more and more people do as a monetization strategy because like there's no, there's no entry point, there's no barrier to entry. I should say, to, to doing this. Now you could do this on the other end as well. If you're thinking about like, hey, do I have a little bit of a budget to grow my newsletter this way also? That's something that people, people are doing to try and get their newsletter in front of people that may not see it is by doing the same thing. Like, hey, I'm going to spend a couple hundred dollars this month allowing people to recommend their newsletter to me as well.

I hope all of this really stresses the importance of growing your list. Again, this is something that I really wish I would have known as a creator, you've seen how growing your list allows you to do wonders both financially and with your content, your reputation. If you prioritize growing your list, because honestly, without your list, you probably can't get to $10,000 a month with your newsletter.