Turn Your Newsletter Into A Money Making Machine (2024 ConvertKit Guide)

Everyone, my name is Matt Ragland, and in this video I'm going to show you how to create an automatic evergreen money-making machine of a newsletter using content that you have created or will create in the future. Now I'm going to show you this as an example in my own ConvertKit account, but I've done this for a bunch of clients. We even have a done-for-you newsletter service called Automatic Evergreen where we kind of build not only just the content, but the machine that can work behind it. So if what you see on this video over the next several minutes is something that you're like, ah, I could use this, maybe you're a podcaster, a YouTuber, maybe you have a book, uh, please reach out and let me know. But for now, let me take this off of myself and show you how I've set this up because I have permission from me to show you how to do this. So this is everything that I'm gonna show you is done in ConvertKit. Even this, uh, very lovely landing page here. Orange is my thing. I I like the color orange. I don't know why I'm telling you that, but what I do here, and maybe I should even come over and show you this mind map first. So when you look at this mind map, never know where I'm pointing over here. What you're seeing is I have or had a productivity newsletter done, YouTube podcast, hundreds of pieces of content on productivity, and I've bucketed that content into these topics. There are probably 4 core topics being goals and actions, time management, mindset and habits, and then ideas and notes. I did a good number of, uh, videos, podcasts, posts, newsletters on reviews, say for like tools and software. And then, uh, 2 or 3 times a year I would, uh, be an affiliate partner for one of my friends. So let's say, uh, Ship 30 for 30 with Zeki and Cole, or Building a Second Brain with Tiago Forte. And so there were some partner frameworks that I would build some campaigns and newsletters around as well. But what I want to show you is over time I would create all of these different like newsletters about goals and actions, like how to plan a productive week and how to stack those productive weeks into successful like months and quarters. I would talk about my different goal setting programs and I'll, I'll tell you all about that in a moment. But The thing that you need to know is that I created enough content to then have like these very specific deep dives, 5 to 6 emails. You could also think, you could also think of them like, you know, topical onboarding series. And that's what I want to show you in this landing page right here. Because what I've done with ConvertKit is I come in and say like, you know, what's, what's the email? Pick Your Path. So this is where I've selected in ConvertKit. This is how to add a tag. So let's just say action. Okay, so once someone enters their email, then they would click on, you know, I'm on the path. And what would happen here is they would get into— well, first of all, if they didn't pick any, because this isn't required, I should say. So let me take step back. Everyone who signs up for my productivity newsletter gets put into this general productivity topic. So they get the two people— the two ways that people get into these deep dives are either they like select something specifically here, in which case they'll come to the action topic, okay, and they would get this onboarding. But what I want to show you, and this is present in all of these deep dives, and I recommend putting into all of your sequences, especially if you want to like chain some of these together. Because the way that this is set up, someone could go through basically a whole month, you know, 4 weeks of content, maybe even a little bit more. I forget the specific like setup of days. Nice thing is I don't, I don't have to remember. I've already done it. Like past me has helped out current me who will continue to help out future me through this, through this automation. But someone can go through, even if they start here at General Productivity, and they can set this up. So they come in, newsletter gets set to out. I might talk about that in probably a different video, but this is just so they don't get the regular newsletter while they're getting this deep dive. And so they go through and they get like, basically this is the General Productivity. So this is like general onboarding. They get like these productivity principles: action, time, ideas, tools, mindset, which you can see except, yeah, except for mindset, which is not something I've written quite as much about and I'm adding into, which we'll talk about. You'll see how that kind of fills itself up. All of these when they click, when they get to this last one. So they're getting kind of an overview of each of these pieces. Relevant resources. Again, this is all stuff that I've done in the past. In the last one, they get this 5-day challenge for each of the 5 principles of productivity. Do you want to choose your productivity path? Let's look at this as a preview. Do you want to start again? This is in general, general onboarding productivity action. Do you want to take a deep dive on any of these? So if someone was to click action, or again, if they were to select action here, then what they're gonna get is to then that tag is added in ConvertKit, which kicks off that next sequence. Okay. So if that's the case, now they're going through and they're getting the action tag. Okay. So you can also see like a nice little, like call out to some liquid right here, which if you add this little snippet of liquid, They'll say like, see you and have a great Wednesday. I'm recording this on Wednesday. So it's just always going to update to the current day, which is fun. Gives it a little, makes people know that like, hey, yep. Uh, he's dialed in with this. So you can see that we go through this whole, now I have an action deep dive. And then again, here at the end, pick your productivity path. Do you want, again, this is an also snippet, action, time, ideas, tools. So, um, this is something that you can set up. So when I have all these pieces, this is the other thing that I want to show you. People can keep chaining these sequences, these automations together, just if they want to keep learning more during onboarding. But the other thing that makes this really powerful is let's say you just have a one-off email, like in my instance, in my, in my instance for ideas and notes, like how to capture your ideas, how to take better notes, how to make use of those notes. So if that's the case, then let's say I have this email. So here's one that I wrote a little while ago that's about note-taking. It's called To-Do's Day, and that's the name of that newsletter. But I'm talking a lot about notes and some building a second brain, which is another thing that I could talk about because that's one of my That's one of my partners in Frameworks, building a second brain, but we'll come back to, we'll come back to that down here. I have this little callout, like very subtle. It's not like a big sales pitch. They say, in the meantime, you can take my 5-day email course about how to turn your ideas into action. Click here to get the first lesson. You'll be done before next week's newsletter is delivered. So if that's the case, then when they click on this, it adds the tag for path ideas. So same thing, now they've initiated it, they've taken the initiative to start this topical deep dive on ideas and notes. And this is just coming from the regular productivity newsletter. So all of these topics that you see here These are things that I can spend a week or an entire month on. Like, let's say, which I have done, like I could do a whole month on ideas and note-taking systems, or people could go through those same 4 to 5 emails in a condensed, like, topical deep dive over the span of 5 to 10 days, depending on how much you want to break them up. So in this, the other reason that this is powerful and useful. So I have, you know, this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, uh, yeah, 5 emails and then these 2 others. So there's 7. After they get these, this 5 email, uh, 5-day email course, now I have like a very like chill pitch. Uh, hey, if you've liked this, you'll probably love my, you'll probably love my course, Building an Idea Development System. And when they click on this link, now they'll get a pitch to build to my note-taking course. And this is just running automatically. I've set all this up as I have new emails. So this is, this is all going out and I have this. If we come back to this mind map, I have this for every single topic. So from goals and actions, the two products are Most Productive Week Ever and the Bullet Journal Basics. These are some ideas or like past high-performing newsletters that I've had, like how to plan your week, the OMGD method, you know, the master task list. Same thing here for time management. I have a time management challenge. I have a journaling habit that is like my framing on how to build habits, ideas and notes. You just saw this one, how to build an idea development system and then reviews, tools and software. Affiliate offers for Notion, Baron Fig, Bullet Journal. So you can see all of these things really work well together. And as I'm continuing to write effective newsletters, or, you know, so not all of them are effective, but as I continue to write newsletters about these topics, then everything— when I see that I have a newsletter that has, uh, performed well— whoops— when I see I have a newsletter that's performed well, then I can come back into like General Productivity, or let's go, uh, even back over here to Time Management. Uh, let's see, topic Time, Creator Stack. Where's the Time Management one? Yeah, so here in the topic of Time the time management one. If I have, like, say, an updated time management email that has worked well, I can either swap that out for— I can either swap out an old email about basically the same stuff for the updated email, or if I have one that is pretty new, then I can just add that to— I can just add that to the series. This one right here is actually a really good example. Now I wouldn't take this like word for word, but probably 90% of it is useful. I'm not going to bring this all the way over right now, but let's say I came in here, you know, time management, how to find more time in the day, how to protect your time. Probably what I would do, let's just say, and click on add an email here. And I do like this. I do like this subject line, so I'm going to keep it. I'm just going to drop this in. Let's see. Yeah, so I'm just going to take all this and I'll go back in and like clean it up when I'm not recording a video. But there we go. Okay. There. Let me just make sure. Is there anything underneath this? Okay. Yeah. Don't know why that didn't come over, but let's just— this should work. Oh, where'd it go? There we go. And don't worry. I'm going to leave this as a draft for now, but don't worry where, like, the layout of this, how it looks versus, like, in the editor. That's just some editor stuff. I'm not going to publish this right now. I still need to move it around. But, you know, here's something I can start using right away. I actually think I already have this video. So this isn't one that I'll probably use. Nope. This might even be one that I still need to go back into. Not sure how to prioritize. Nope. Yeah. So this, this would be a very valuable addition. I need to write an outro and everything. But you can see that this was a high-performing email. If we come back here, you know, opens, yeah, 56% right there. That's very good. So I just need to clean this up and make it, you know, put an intro and an outro basically. I don't know if I'll even include like this, this note, this reference to rap85. If I go to rap85, maybe this is another— yeah, this is probably another email that I could create and move over. So if I'm talking about this, this is just something that as I'm observing this, then I could look at it and say, hey, if I refer to this in, in one email, then probably I could take this, this email right here and maybe put it even before the one that I have going on right now. So this is just going to stay a draft, but you can see like these are two emails now that I wrote based on this like time tracking. So this would be, you know, newsletter, newsletter sent, and that would be— let's just move this up a little bit. This would be, um, what if you tracked every hour of your life and, uh, excessive time tracking. So these are two. Yeah, those are two emails that I could write that I know have performed well. Okay. So from a big picture, what we want to do is define— this is the key part. You need to define these core topics. That's what you start with. So in this example, goals and actions, time management, so on and so forth. Define those core topics. Start to write. Think of your first, like, say, 4 to 5 emails in each of these topics. Like, how would I introduce or move along my subscribers with this topic? So you can see, like, what I did here with Let's go back to general productivity. Like if I wanted to teach someone the principles of productivity, what are the emails that I would write? Okay. I would talk about how to take action, how to set goals, how to protect your time, how to cultivate ideas, how to pick the right tools, and then how to have like a growth mindset, a mindset that cultivates and promotes productivity. And then I could even say like, okay, well now what do I want to do? From like say the time management perspective, what do I want to do? Let's make this smaller. What do I want to do to like explain this? Okay, well, how do you find more time in the day? How do you block your time using this 10-block method that I have? How do you protect, prioritize? What if you tracked every hour? What would that look like? So you can see I've set these up and then at the end, like I have for the ideas topic right here, you know, same thing. How do you capture every idea? How do you capture and develop your ideas? What can you build with better ideas? This is where I, when they have willingly and excitedly opted into this, there's an impulse buy at the end. And I also know that everyone in here as well, like this is just straightforward, like Justin Welsh style. Like less than $100, $150 course, this is now something that even if they don't buy right away, maybe I run a Black Friday promotion, maybe I just do like some general promotion. Everybody who's been through that sequence I know is probably a pretty warm lead for a product like this. And even everyone who goes through it now, like these are people that if I do a cohort course later on, I could give them a $98 coupon. So that's getting, you know, a little further down the path, But this is what I recommend you doing with your email, with your email list, with your email, with your email strategy. If you want any, if you want any help, if you have any questions about this, the agency that I'm a partner in, Good People Digital, we have a service called Automatic Evergreen and it is a done-for-you newsletter service, which means if you're a podcaster, if you're a YouTuber, Basically, if you know the value of the email, but you don't have like the time or inclination to write a regular newsletter, we will use your, we will use your already excellent content as source material for remixing that for you and creating the, like, not just an ongoing weekly newsletter, but there's also like a way that we can do exactly what I've just showed you here. So, uh, we have a system for this. You can take everything that I've explained to you right now and do it yourself. I hope you do. Because it will make your readers happier and it will make you money and it will like do all of these things automatically without you having to worry about it in the future. So I hope that you get value out of this. If you have any questions, you can ask in the Loom. You can also find me on Twitter or X @MattRagland. Also on LinkedIn, same thing, Matt Ragland. I'm pretty much Matt Ragland everywhere, but hope this is helpful for you and I hope to hear from you on the internet. Thanks. Bye.