To earn decent amount from email newsletter you need attract interested subscribers and useful information to publish. This is success story of a newsletter service that helps reporters find right business to write about in their report. Peter Shankman founder of Help A Reporter Out – HARO explains how business works, where revenue generated, how to deliver newsletter and other interesting aspects.
Everyone in this newsletter business is happy using it.
- Subscribers get great opportunity to be featured on newspapers, magazines, digital media, TV, radio. Newsletter is completely free to receive and opens opportunity to free publicity for businesses of any size.
- Reporters reach to great resources to write about. Businesses, communities, celebrities, politicians and other important personnel subscribe to newsletter.
- Owner earns money from advertisement in newsletter
- Advertisers reach to huge audience of professionals who read newsletter daily.
As you see it is win-win situation for everybody. It is still not easy to create such a service in terms of reaching to required amount of interest and users.
Here are notes from interview that explain how email newsletter business works and generates money:
- Business grew out of facebook group , built in 2007, that was used by many people. Moved to web in March of 2008.
- 100,000 subscribers receive 3 newsletters daily with 60 requests.
- This newsletter is time sensitive and needs to be delivered in 1-2 hour to everybody. Reporter may need article to be delivered by 17:00 today.
- Used AWeber at the beginning to send newsletter once per day. Aweber is not time sensitive it spreads delivery through time to reduce load on mail servers. It is not suitable for time sensitive newsletters. It is more useful for tracking usage and create sale funnels.
- Advertisement is 4 line text at the beginning of newsletter.
- Advertisement costs 1500$ – 2500$ per newsletter and booked 5-6 month ahead. Which means it has huge demand for it.
- Owner is negative about selling products in newsletter through recommendation. Thinks that advertisement is best fit and works well.
- Helped many business that was shrinking getting publicity and boost with business requests again.
- Owner speaks at conferences about using social media. This way gets trust and introduces his newsletter business as a useful tool. Reporters use this service because they trust that report request is not public but delivered directly to subscribers.
- Report requests cannot be published on a website revealing contact details of reporter.
- Subscribing to newsletter is very easy, it is simple online registration.
- In future subscribers can receive filtered requests by category that they subscribed.
- Competitors who bought email list is not succeeding because they have very few reporters that trust and request. Also many reporters are happy with speed and quality that HARO delivers to them and don’t need any other alternative to post a report request.
- 4 people working on this newsletter business.
- Advertisers have a great success by selling 200 books in 10 minutes and other measurable successes.
These are some key notes that I highlighted reading interview which can give some idea for your future business. It has many lessons to learn that can be applied to similar businesses and I know that by learning all successful businesses you can use them in your business in future. It will all be clear regarding how to use this information when you most need it. You can read full interview at mixergy.