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- Local newsletter for a small city: $200K last year 💰
Local newsletter for a small city: $200K last year 💰
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Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Local Newsletter For a Small City: $200K Last Year
Boost Work Productivity With ChatGPT
Failed Dropshipper Now Earning $100K/Month
$100K Online Community in One Year
SEO Advice From a $1 Million Business
This AI Learning Community Earned $225K in 6 Months
$10K/Month as an Online Personal Trainer
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📝 Ryan Sneddon writes Naptown Scoop, a local newsletter for Annapolis, Maryland...
The Scoop does soft news, meaning coverage is generally light and lifestyle-focused.
Per a recent profile, the newsletter earned about $200,000 in 2023 🤑
(Check out their homepage. Amazing that something so simple can be the front door to a $200k/year business.)
Ryan started his first newsletter just before the pandemic…
Ryan quit his job to start his own thing (he wasn’t sure what). He landed on The Daily Thread, which he now says was “a terrible newsletter. It was a terrible project, but it did teach me all the basics of how to start a newsletter.”
Over 10 months, Ryan spent "500 or 800 bucks" running The Daily Thread, which topped out around 800 subscribers, a 35% open rate, and $300 in revenue.
Even though it never took off, working on that newsletter for 10 months was a valuable learning experience 🧠
Ryan then moved in with his parents to Annapolis and started Naptown Scoop in August, 2020.
(Naptown is a nickname for Annapolis.)
🚀 Naptown Scoop quickly…
overtook The Daily Thread in terms of subscribers within a month, and [Ryan] sold that “terrible newsletter” to one of its subscribers for $800, going all-in on the Scoop.
In the 3.5 years since, Ryan has grown it to 18,000 subscribers and has been able to quit his day job.
A recent edition of the newsletter 👉 Come for the fun, take the cannoli
As you can see there, Ryan monetises via multiple ad slots.
😍 I love local newsletter businesses like this, and Ryan proves that it can work well even in a small city.
(Annapolis population = 40,000)
Could you do something similar for your city or region?
Other location-specific online businesses we’ve profiled 👇
$1 Million Hyperlocal Website (Frisco, Texas)
$2500/Month Website + Newsletter (Mallorca, Spain)
$12K/Month 1-Woman Tourist Website (San Francisco)
Turning Her Passion Into $16K/Month (Rome, Italy)
💬 Ryan's advice for starting a newsletter…
Mastering the basics is what makes you win. It’s just about not quitting. So many people say they’re going to do a newsletter, write three episodes, and then quit.
If you commit to writing a newsletter, and you say you’re going to send it at this time on these days, and you just do exactly that, and you don’t miss an edition for three-and-a-half years — I’m living proof it can change your life.
Want to get the most out of ChatGPT?
Revolutionize your workday with the power of ChatGPT! Dive into HubSpot’s guide to discover how AI can elevate your productivity and creativity. Learn to automate tasks, enhance decision-making, and foster innovation, all through the capabilities of ChatGPT.
Failed Dropshipper Now Earning $100K/Month
Neil Shap is the co-founder of an agency called Linx Digital…
We specialize in direct-response video ads on Youtube, TikTok, and Meta.
📝 In a recent interview, he reveals…
We are currently doing around 6 figures a month, with about 40-50% profit margin.
Neil studied aerospace engineering in 2016 and learned digital marketing while in college…
When I finished school, the aerospace industry in Canada wasn't doing too well, so jobs in that field were tough to come by, I decided to give this online world a fair shot.
I started off doing SEO for my own private affiliate sites. It made a little bit of money ($400/month) and I was hooked. Not to say that was a lot of money or anything, but that first success kind of taught me that making money online was possible and wasn't just a thing that was something theoretical.
He also tried dropshipping and lost $2k doing that 😭
But…
what that process did teach me was how to run facebook ads.
Then…
I had a friend that was looking for someone to help run Facebook ads for one of his clients.
I took the project on and did a decent job… We slowly realized that the ads management service we were providing was valuable to businesses and decided to approach it as a team.
Great example of how just trying things and being willing to fail can lead to eventual success 💪
Neil struggled with affiliate marketing and dropshipping but learned valuable skills from those efforts.
🗣️ To get traction and spread word for the ad agency…
We posted on all of the places that had what we thought had our ideal customers and tried to have genuine conversations with them. We posted in relevant Facebook groups, private Slack channels, conferences and events.
Then once we did a good job, a good portion of new business came from referrals. We also would bid for projects on platforms like Upwork.
Nowadays…
The main marketing channel for us is our organic Youtube channel [20K subscribers]
We use this channel to give tons of information out for completely free.
As a result we have now become the leading authority on Youtube ads and some of the other platforms.
🤑 Monetization…
If a brand wants to work with us, the cost is $5k/m + a percentage of ad spend.
We also have a stand-alone course ($1497) that teaches people how to run their own youtube ads. We recently also launched a tiktok masterclass that teaches people the basic of running tiktok ads.
He adds…
One of the reasons for our success is that we were providing a service that was very new and had very little competition in.
Back in 2018-2019, there were very few people doing Youtube ads and this helped us stand out and get those first few clients.
Hmm.
What's the equivalent of that for 2024?
I hear about AI and automation non-stop nowadays but that's all still very new, so likely lots of opportunities there.
Accordingly, here's the top ten from Upwork's most recent in-demand skills list 👇
Data Analytics
Machine Learning
Data Visualization
Data Extraction
Data Engineering
Data Processing
Data Mining
Experimentation & Testing
Deep Learning
Generative AI Modeling
🗂 $100K Online Community in One Year
From the archive, published May 2021…
That’s Ness Labs, “a community of curious humans who want to achieve more without sacrificing their mental health.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff started it in March 2020 and it’s now up to $9,272 in monthly recurring revenue, and has earned $109k total so far 🤑
The community grew out of a free weekly newsletter Anne-Laure started in 2019.
In a recent AMA she explained how she’d grow the business if she had to start over from scratch:
Start by building an audience, which I did on Twitter and with my newsletter.
Once you reach a decent number of followers/subscribers, launch a community so they can connect together (the exact number of followers/subscribers you need depends on the type of community you want to build, for example a small mastermind of 10 community members may only require a newsletter with 100-200 subscribers)
SEO Advice From a $1 Million Business
A recent Google Search update has hit a lot of businesses hard.
Some even say that Google "is killing independent sites" ☠️
Nick Loper recently talked with Kelan Kline from The Savvy Couple…
Kelan built his online business up from making $50 in the first year to now seeing around 500k pageviews a month. That led to his online business making 7-figures last year.
Kelan's business has continued to do well despite Google's algorithm updates 🥳
Some key tips he shares…
Build brand authority: have a presence everywhere on the internet, not just your site.
Create genuinely helpful content.
Content production engine: have a system to help you produce regular content.
Content audit and republishing: refresh and optimize old posts.
Diversify traffic sources: Kelan uses YouTube and Pinterest to get more traffic.
Create your own products: Kelan offers a bundle of digital products with upsells to reduce dependence on affiliate/ads.
Kelan and his partner also monetize with a membership program for their other site, The Savvy Mama.
Related: a recent episode of the Authority Hacker podcast showing how they're using Facebook as an alternative traffic source, and making money from it 🤑
This AI Learning Community Earned $225K in 6 Months
Check out Promptmaster, a course and community that helps you get more out of ChatGPT 🤖
In a recent post, co-founder David Szabo-Stuban writes…
We almost made a quarter million dollars which is really good for a first year for a bootstrapped business.
🚀 The origin story…
I had some background in [Machine Learning] prior to ChatGPT… Since Nov 2022 I was spending all my free time hacking stuff together using GPT either via ChatGPT or the API.
Quickly I found myself teaching colleagues, friends etc and my friend Dave (same name, yes) who had a background as a teacher suggested we should focus on teaching.
They hired an ML professor and built a "prompt engineering" course together, which made them a quick $30,000 💰
Then, in September 2023…
We were lucky because one of our IG reels was picked up by a ChatGPT plugin developer who had 250k users and we did a live webinar together. That's when we actually launched our first offer.
We had over 2k people signing up for our webinar, 700 attended, we made $40k in the first month.
So they've done really well with strategic partnerships, teaming up with experts to supercharge their efforts.
Could you do something like this in your niche or industry? 🤔
Another key to their success…
When I'm looking at the prompting market I see 90% snake oil salesmen 10% real competition. We figured we'd take the hard road: outteach EVERYONE…
Our focus is on service, every day provide better service to our clients than yesterday. The product doesn't matter. The funnel doesn't matter. When I have a client in front of me with a problem, I help them solve it, period. Rinse and repeat.
In other words, they focused on delivering a ton of value to their customers.
One way they did this was via customer interviews, which had them connecting with their audience and collecting useful feedback so they could improve 📈
Last words from David…
If you're just starting out, be patient. It took me almost a decade to finally get lucky. You'll get there.
Love that 😍
If you stick around long enough, luck is sure to come your way.
🗂 $10K/Month as an Online Personal Trainer
From the archive, published April 2023…
13-minute video from Sukh Sidhu detailing how he became a full-time online personal trainer 💪
He had a head start since he owned a couple of gyms, but I reckon his journey is instructive for anyone wanting to do some kind of online coaching / consulting / training.
First, Sukh found 6 people who agreed to have him as an online personal trainer for 12 weeks. He worked for free and documented their results 📝
The results were so good that all 6 clients stayed on after the 12 weeks, paying Sukh £100/month (approx $125 USD) going forward. And Sukh was able to show off their results on social media and via his email list to land even more clients.
As the service became more popular, Sukh raised his rate. Eventually he had 60 clients paying him £100-250/month. Then he scaled it back down to 40 so he didn’t lose his sanity 🤪
With 40 clients he must have been earning something like £8000/month as an online personal trainer, which is about $10k USD 💰
Sukh kept evolving the business. He started offering online group coaching and brought a couple of other trainers on board to help with the workload.
Eventually he launched his own software product for personal trainers, which was pulling in $30k/month last I checked.
Really cool to see his progression through different levels of online business. And a great example of how a simple 1-to-1 service business can lead to big things 📈
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
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