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This daily practice helps him earn $25,000+ each month 👀
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
6-Figure Paid Newsletter Blueprint (He's Done It Twice)
This Software Powers Million Dollar Newsletters
This Daily Practice Helps Him Earn $25K+ Each Month
You May Fail, And That’s Okay
Business Idea: YouTubers Would Pay For This
$3745 Profit From an AI-Generated Blog Post
1st Year Niche Jobs Marketplace Earns $100,000
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Nicolas Cole tweets…
Our paid “Write With AI” newsletter just hit $200k/year… only takes 4 hours/week.
The newsletter teaches people how to write better with tools like ChatGPT and has grown to 21,000 subscribers since starting in April 📈
It is run by Nicolas and Dickie Bush, who also run a writing program called Ship 30 For 30.
👉 Here's a free example issue of Write with AI from several months back.
Nicolas adds…
This is the 2nd paid newsletter I’ve grown to 6 figures in the past 2 years.
(First one was Category Pirates, which hit 6 figures and became a Top 5 Business Paid Newsletter on Substack in the first 9 months.)
Safe to say, Nicolas knows what he’s doing 😎
He lays out his 6-Figure Paid Newsletter Blueprint on Twitter…
99% of the time, free newsletters are the way to go.
They’re easy to start. Easy to learn.
However… Paid newsletters are The Holy Grail of writing online…
The problem is: very few writers (even seasoned veterans who have been writing for a long time) understand how to write things that have the capacity to be monetized directly.
Nicolas says there are two types of paid newsletters 👇
Researched Curation
Original Thinking
Either can work…
Researched Curation can be repeated infinitely (always more to research), and Original Thinking can be repeated infinitely (always more expertise to share).
🔑 Another key…
Readers very rarely, if ever, pay for “words.”
What makes a paid newsletter work is when the reader feels as though you are giving them TANGIBLE objects delivered in newsletter form.
What are tangible objects?
• Reports
• Prompts
• Templates
• Case studies
• Etc.
You can literally “hold” these kinds of things in your hands, making them tangible. And what is tangible is perceived to be more valuable.
The secret to selling things in the digital world is to make your digital work feel like an analog object.
Could you turn your own writing into something more tangible? 🤔
Nicolas also reveals how long he would test a newsletter to see if it has 6-figure potential…
About 6 months.
If your paid newsletter isn’t generating $5-10k per month within the first 6 months, you most likely haven’t checked all the boxes… you haven’t figured out what is truly valuable…
You can give it 1 year if you want to “trust your gut.” But anything beyond 1 year is usually a dog.
This Software Powers Million Dollar Newsletters
Today's email is brought to you by Beehiiv 🐝
That's the software I use to publish and grow this newsletter. I switched to it a few months ago and it's been great so far.
Beehiiv's CEO was head of growth at Morning Brew, a newsletter which was valued at $75 million a few years ago 🤯
Beehiiv is also the software used to power The Milk Road, a newsletter that sold for $10+ million after only 10 months.
I really like the pricing of Beehiiv. There's a 14-day free trial and you can continue to use it for free up to 2,500 subscribers. After that it's flat-rate pricing.
For example, I'm paying $84/month for my list of 20k subscribers. And the price doesn't increase until I hit 100k subscribers.
I just checked another popular newsletter software and I'd be paying $210/month on there currently, and $700/month by the time I reached 100k subscribers 😱
So yeah, Beehiiv is a really nice, inexpensive way to start a newsletter. And they've got a ton of growth tools built in.
👉 Check it out if you're thinking to start a newsletter.
This Daily Practice Helps Him Earn $25K+ Each Month
Jordan Hughes is the founder of Untitled UI…
the largest UI kit and design system for Figma in the world. Kickstart any project, save thousands of hours, and level up as a designer.
Figma is a popular software for designing websites, mobile apps, etc.
Untitled UI basically gives you a bunch of design components you can use in Figma so you're not starting with a blank canvas 🥳
According to a recent profile of Jordan…
He was a drummer and an aspiring teacher before venturing into the world of startups by chance in 2015.
Elsewhere, Jordan mentions the project he worked on before Untitled UI…
I built (and later sold) goodbooks.io, the largest curated collection of 8,500+ book recommendations from some of the most successful and interesting people in the world.
That's worth checking out, basically lists of books that famous people recommend, monetized with display ads and affiliate links 🤑
(Methinks there could be a site like that for famous people in every walk of life. Example: a site listing what smartphones top athletes use.)
Back to Untitled UI, and it was an unusual project for Jordan to jump into…
I don’t have a background in design. This may sound alarming, but I consider a generalist approach an important asset.
I studied Management and Finance… before working as an Ops Manager in high-growth startups.
This involved learning fast and wearing a lot of hats.
In mid-2019, I decided I wanted to pursue design.
🚀 He started working on Untitled UI in 2021…
This library started as a side project but has grown into the largest and best-selling Figma UI kit in the world.
According to that recent profile, Jordan’s Untitled UI is likely bringing in over 6-figures per year, at a very conservative estimate.
There is a free version of the product but the paid versions start at $129 a pop.
If we assume Untitled UI is making at least 5 sales per day, then Jordan is likely earning $25,000+ each month 💰
One thing that stood out to me about Jordan's marketing, which has surely helped him gain traction: his Made with Untitled UI tweet series.
Every day for 580+ days now, he's tweeted a screenshot of something he'd designed with his own kit.
Simple, but effective 👍
Could you post something online every day that highlights what you're working on?
Even if your work isn't awesome in the beginning, you'll improve greatly with the daily practice and people will start to take notice 👀
🗂 You May Fail, And That’s Okay
From the archive, published March 2023…
📚 From a book called The Power of Full Engagement…
Our experience – and considerable research – suggests that setbacks are an intrinsic part of any significant change process. The motivation to make a change, and even the specific plan for doing so, may often just be the first step.
The researcher James Prochaska has found, for example, that people launching a major change in their lives often fail several times before succeeding in a sustaining way.
I’ve experienced that first-hand myself.
When I quit my job in 2010, I was super confident that I’d be earning $10,000+ per month within a year. I’d seen other people doing that just by selling simple ebooks and figured I could do the same 😎
And while I was able to earn a decent living working online for many years – mainly via freelancing – my first $10,000+ month didn’t happen until 2020.
So yeah, I tried and failed for about a decade before reaching that goal 😕
But since reaching it, I’ve only had one month where my business has earned LESS than $10,000 per month. (You can see all my finance reports here, btw)
All that to say: try not to let failure get you down.
Learn from it, pick yourself up, and take another shot.
You’ll hit a big one eventually.
🔎 freelancing | permalink
Business Idea: YouTubers Would Pay For This
💬 Pat Walls shares a business idea…
Some sort of vetted YouTube/TikTok/Instagram scriptwriter marketplace / job board.
Pain point: Finding good writers for video content is nearly impossible.
Pat started a YouTube channel in April and has grown to 120K+ subscribers since 📈
A big part of that growth is storytelling.
A recent video from his channel will give you a feel for it…
Back to Pat's business idea…
1/100 people who call themselves writers can actually write video content that performs.
It's so hard to find this talent that creators will just say 'fuck it' and do it themselves, even though it's the biggest bottleneck for any creator trying to scale.
The hard part of this business would be vetting the scriptwriters to be amazing and keep it very high quality.
I would use this and pay for it.
There are surely a whole bunch of YouTubers like Pat who feel the same way.
But before you start building, keep in mind that marketplaces are tough 🙈
I consider them a Level 5 online business.
In other words, among the most complex / difficult / expensive to build.
So if you want to run with Pat's idea, a much-less-difficult approach would be to find 2-3 great video scriptwriters, and start an agency with them.
Your job as head of the agency would be to find brands to work with, and make sure the scriptwriters have everything they need to deliver great results for those brands.
If all goes well, you could eventually hire more scriptwriters and transition into a marketplace business.
💡 Another idea here: how about creating an AI app that generates new video scripts based on the scripts of existing videos?
Simon Høiberg did that for a video several months back (skip to the 3:19 mark).
But I believe there's still no app that makes this process easier 🤔
$3745 Profit From an AI-Generated Blog Post
Niche Site Lady tweets…
This AI-generated blog post made $4,840 in the past 30 days 🤯
She doesn’t reveal the piece of content, but says it’s a blog in the travel niche.
While Niche Site Lady doesn't reveal her true identity, she appears to be the real deal, with 63k followers and results like these…
More details about her AI-generated blog post…
[It's] a simple listicle post.
I don't like to give AI free rein to do research. Instead, I paste in a load of facts and have it use only this info to generate a blog post.
I like that approach to writing with AI: have it create a draft based on trusted data you feed into it.
That way you're less likely to end up with the made-up-facts that tools like ChatGPT can generate 🤖
Another unique thing about Niche Site Lady's approach…
The main traffic source for this article was Facebook.
I spent $1,095 to generate 27,256 clicks, at a cost of 4c per click.
(Each click made me 5.6c so not a huge return).
Most blogs tend to rely on search traffic from Google, which can take months to pick up.
But this Facebook approach lets you start earning from display ads (or affiliate offers) much quicker 🚀
Especially when you combine it with some organic action…
The post also attracted 41,489 clicks from Facebook organically.
These came from me posting it on my Facebook page (which has 13k fans), and people sharing it naturally...
Of course, building an engaged Facebook page with 13k fans takes a lot of work 💪
But it goes to show that you don't need to rely on Google to build a profitable blog.
Just be aware that the Facebook ads approach is quite hands-on…
I keep a close eye on [FB ads manager] and turn off once the CPC rises too close to the RPM.
It never lasts long. Then I have to find a new post to try it with. [I optimize the ads] for clicks.
💰 Niche Site Lady's numbers for that one particular blog post in 30 days…
$4,840 revenue
$1,095 spent on Facebook ads
$3,745 profit
🗂 1st Year Niche Jobs Marketplace Earns $100,000
From the archive, published January 2023…
You can see it at FiveTeams.com.
By default the site is in German, since it’s targeting the German market 🇩🇪
A recent profile describes the niche…
FiveTeams specifically focuses on people who are presently working at an international tech company. Someone who’s not exactly looking for a job actively but might consider switching to a different role if a better job or a higher salary is offered.
Looks like the site was launched in 2021 and I believe their main revenue stream is via recruitment fees paid by employers 💰
Here’s the real kicker though: the site was built out in 2.5 months with a no-code tech stack.
The story goes that one of the co-founders was trying to code up the website himself initially…
Alessandro started watching Javascript tutorials on YouTube.
During one such session of learning to buildd a multi-step form in 6 hours, Alessandro found the solution to all his problems. The top comment under that video read: “Why not build it on Bubble in 5 minutes?”.
(Bubble has a free plan you can practice with, btw.)
The no-code tech stack used by FiveTeams costs them about €500 per month.
Whereas…
If they would have taken the traditional route to buildd the platform their cost would be between €800K to over one million. Their overall production cost is only 5-10% of that!
Noted at the end of that profile 👇
It’s also quite hard to find great Bubble developers compared to finding web developers.
Freelance Bubble developer?
Worth considering if you’re looking for a marketable skill to build.
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Thinking to start a newsletter? I'd highly recommend checking out Beehiiv 👈
It's the same software I use to publish and grow this newsletter, and it's free up to 2500 subscribers 😎
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