How to Make Money from a Newsletter ?

by: ada 0

Have you ever wondered why there are so many newsletters around? The answer is simple: they are beneficial to their owners. A newsletter can be beneficial in many ways and one of them is to make money from it. For many marketers, a newsletter is a real cash cow. All you need is a good WordPress newsletter plugin and hard work. Here are some ways in which you can make money from a newsletter.

Sell Affiliate Products/Services

The most profitable use of a newsletter is to sell affiliate products/services. In fact, this could easily turn into your major source of income. All equal, affiliate sales pay good commissions and you can make more money with them than with the other ways to monetize a newsletter. There are lot of affiliate marketers who are living life by promoting affiliate products to their large audience on various niches/markets.

The two vital things for your success are a large, targeted subscriber base and offers that match their interests.

If these two conditions are met, you can rest assured that your newsletter will be well monetized. When you show the right product to the right audience, the chances of making sale is higher.

Offer Your Own Products/Services at a Discount

If you have your own products/services for sale, you must include them in your newsletter. Well, the choice of products/services you offer will hardly be as rich as the offers you can get from various affiliate networks but you can’t afford to miss such a great sales channel.

Instead of using affiliates to sell your products, you become your own affiliate. Since you won’t be paying affiliate commissions, you can offer a generous discount to your newsletter subscribers and chances are that if your products/services are good, this won’t go unnoticed.

Include Paid Ads

All those affiliates, who are making tons of money from affiliate sales and sales of their own products/services will regard this tip as a waste of valuable newsletter space. However, if you aren’t that lucky to make a decent amount from affiliate sales, you can consider alternatives to monetize your newsletter.

Paid ads are one of these alternatives. Probably the first thing that comes to your mind is Adsense but unfortunately you can’t offer it because Adsense doesn’t allow their ads in emails, unless it is in a feed. But the world doesn’t end with Adsense, so search for other advertisers who allow their ads in emails and place them.

• Another approach is to find direct advertisers and offer them ad space. Seek for advertisers in your niche and contact them. If your rates are affordable, you will find advertisers for sure. You can charge based on the size of your newsletter subscribers.
• For example, if you have 10K subscribers, you can charge around $100 per Ad space. Don’t hurt your subscribers with irrelevant ads, make sure that your ads are related to your audience and their interests.

Offer Merchandise for Purchase

Merchandise is one more way to make money from a newsletter. You can sell branded T-shirts, pens, caps, mugs, etc. However, in order for this to work, you need to have a very strong brand users would want to identify with.

This is why for the average newsletter merchandise will hardly become a great money-maker but still it is better than nothing. You can also promote seasonal items based on the holidays (say, Christmas special…)

Make Money Indirectly

In addition to the direct ways to make money from your newsletter, there are indirect benefits you can enjoy.

For instance, when you include roundups of your site content and visitors go to your site, they will click ads, buy stuff, etc. and all this will be making you money. This helps to keep your subscribers close to your business and you can ping them anytime to come back to your site.

This is social media era, there are tools like facebook, twitter to keep hold of your audience but still newsletters are more personalized, builds a strong relation between your business and its audience.

The fact that you are running a reputable newsletter helps to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. This might not bring you money directly but it is pretty common for clients to hire experts they encounter on the Net (i.e. by reading your newsletter). This way a newsletter is making you money (i.e. the money the client will pay you when you finish a project for him or her) you would have otherwise missed.

Conclusion

Although sales (affiliate and sales of your own products/services) are the major way to make money from a newsletter, don’t neglect the other opportunities. In today’s tough economy every dollar you make is welcome, so don’t miss the chances a newsletter presents you with.

As an added tip: You can also conduct periodic surveys through your newsletter and understand the audience interests, expectations. This helps to tweak your broadcast with more targeted products and promotions than before.

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