Earn a Living With Your Paid Email Newsletter

You may be familiar with traditional newsletters, but an evergreen newsletter is a smart and automated approach to standard email newsletters. It allows established creators to step off the content hamster wheel, build a personalized journey for new subscribers, and make better versions of future email sequences based on audience feedback.  

Nathan Barry, CEO of ConvertKit, has made $50K from “a secret newsletter about money.” He noticed that a lot of content existed for new creators, but not for established ones. Nathan’s “Secret Money Newsletter” is a paid $149 email sequence targeting established creators that make at least $200K annually. It currently has 500 subscribers and an impressive 87% open rate. 

In this episode, Alyssa and Melissa talk to Nathan about the power of transparency and providing context behind success metrics, the advantages of an evergreen newsletter, and connecting with your audience by incorporating their feedback into future email sequences.

Key Takeaways

• [03:03] - What is Nathan’s paid newsletter about?
• [08:26] - Why Nathan is so transparent about his own finances, and is it worth it?
• [17:24] - How much revenue has Nathan’s paid newsletter generated?  
• [22:36] - What is the most challenging aspect of an evergreen newsletter?
• [29:06] - Why evergreen newsletters are a great way to showcase your expertise.
• [32:30] - How an evergreen newsletter can remove the pressure of wanting it to be “perfect”.
• [34:21] - How to keep email sequences from overwhelming your subscribers.
• [36:45] - What are Nathan’s plans for the future of his newsletter?
• [39:59] - Why asking your audience for specific feedback makes it so much easier to keep writing content.
• [45:16] - Nathan’s method for coming up with content for future emails.

Quotes

[14:04] - “By putting advice out there, and real numbers, you show people what’s possible and they can learn from the specifics. It makes a huge difference when people share actual numbers, it gives you real context.”  ~ @nathanbarry

[20:35] - “I love with email how few barriers there are between your ideas and the reader.” ~ @nathanbarry

[32:47] - “If you know this is going to be email #1 for a long time, that puts the pressure on it. But, good news — you can edit it. So 15 people will get that, and you can learn from it and so the version that’s going to go out to 500 people over a period of time is so much better, and a lot of the pressure comes off.” ~ @nathanbarry

Links

• Nathan Barry on Twitter
• Nathan Barry on LinkedIn
• Nathan Barry
• A secret newsletter about money
• Buy Back Your Time
• Subscribe to the monthly Deliverability Defined newsletter!
• Ask Alyssa & Melissa questions or suggest content for our next monthly newsletter!

Connect with our hosts

• Alyssa Dulin
• Melissa Lambert

Stay in touch

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• Spotify
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• Deliverability Defined Website

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It's now free to use ConvertKit with an audience of 1,000 subscribers or less! Start building your audience and reaching their inboxes: convertkit.com/pricing.