

Ask HN: Do you make money from newsletters? - ekpyrotic

Hi all - I wondered whether anyone on HN might make a reasonable secondary (or primary) income through newsletters?<p>Have you managed to distil any principles for getting started, growing your audience, and converting your subscribers?
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WestCoastJustin
Provide something useful, on a regular basis, then gradually try to sell
something. It took me well over 2 years before I made money from it. It takes
an _extremely_ long time to build your subscriber base too. I am talking about
month over month, you will be sending newsletter blasts to 5, 10, the 30
people, then one month 1000 people will sign up. Takes will power to push
through. Just the name of the game. So, start early, and do not expect much.
If you are looking for good examples, check out
[http://www.devopsweekly.com/](http://www.devopsweekly.com/) &
[http://rubyweekly.com/](http://rubyweekly.com/). Subscribe to them and check
out the format. They are both free, and provide high quality curated content,
but have "sponsored" (clearly marked) parts. This should give you some
inspiration.

There is pretty much zero barrier to entry. Register a domain, create a one-
page static website on AWS S3/CF, which will host your signup form (and list
archive for seo reasons), then use
[http://mailchimp.com/](http://mailchimp.com/) to run the list. You could have
it up and running in an afternoon. Finding high quality curated content is the
hard part.

I would suggest picking something you know tons about, or something fairly
new. Take golang for example, there is tons of information churn, so you want
someone in the know, to tell you about interesting things. This is the
underlining principle for devopsweekly and rubyweekly. You do not even need to
be an expect, just put in the time to track down interesting bits, over the
last week. This can and should take many hours.

Having said all that, you are probably thinking it is common sense, and it
pretty much it. There is no rocket science to it, just put in the work, have
high quality content, and it should just work. Patio11 has tons of great info
about email marketing. Although, maybe not specific to newsletters, much of it
applies. Read on
[https://www.google.ca/?q=patio11+email+marketing](https://www.google.ca/?q=patio11+email+marketing)

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wikwocket
I'd recommend you look at the story of Hacker Newsletter. A lot of the
comments in the discussion threads here on HN have been full of good ideas:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20newsletter&sort=byPop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker%20newsletter&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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neduma
checkout [https://cooperpress.com/](https://cooperpress.com/)

