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When I graduated from university in 2018, I started building a blogging business where I would write blog posts targeting keywords that people were searching on Google.

Then some of my blog posts would appear for those searches and I would make money from AD revenue.

I grew that business to $11k per month in revenue by 2022. My life was easy since I was benefiting from the earnings that I was getting from all of the previous blog posts that I had written.

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In the day to day, I would just write blog posts for 2 hours or so in the morning, then do some research to find new blog posts to write and I would be done.

The problem was that I was 100% reliant on Google’s search algorithms. One change to their algorithm and I would potentially lose all of my earnings.

Exactly that happened in late 2022 when Google released one of its algo updates. My revenue dropped from $11k to $2k over night. I spent the next 6 months trying to recover before realizing that it was not going to happen.

The main learning I took away from this was that YOU MUST TRY TO OWN YOUR AUDIENCE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

If a business model does not direct people towards something that you own then you are not building a business, you are renting a business.

Today, regardless of the business model you are trying to do (dropshipping, ecom, agencies, digital products,…), you must send your users to an email list and work on effectively monetizing your email list.

Here is how I am growing and monetizing email lists and newsletters today:

First, if you do not have money to invest in ads, you need to start building an audience on social media (tiktok, Insta, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube).

Start with one platform to start and then brand out to other platforms as you grow and systematize your processes.

I have grown my own Instagram to 70k followers in 5 months or so. Instagram is the easiest place to grow right now in my opinion and it is better than Tiktok for growing an email list because you can use something called Manychat.

This is an app that automatically sends links to people when they comment a certain word. So, you create a lead magnet for your email list and then you tell people to comment “X” to get the lead magnet. Manychat then automatically DMs them the link.

I have a full guide about growing your email list using Instagram in the Digital Creator 2.0.

Once you have started gaining traction on a social platform, you create a free product which functions as a lead magnet. This is something that you give away to people in exchange for their email.

So, when you create content on social media, you tell people to go to your lead magnet to get the free guide. This is how you grow your email list using social media.

You can monetize early on by using Beehiiv boosts or Sparkloop recommendations. This is where other newsletters get recommended after someone signs up to your newsletter.

If someone subscribes to them, then you get paid for it ($1 to $6 per subscriber).

However, the real money comes from sponsors and from selling your own products.

So, after posting on socials and building your list to 10k+ people, you can start reaching out to sponsors.

You can charge about $10 to $60 per 1000 subscribers on your list for an AD spot. It largely depends on where your subscribers are from and their incomes.

To get sponsors, the easiest thing to do is to look for people who have sponsored similar newsletters to yours and to reach out to them.

The next way to monetize is by creating your own products, ideally a digital product because you can easily automate the sale and it is all profit.

To create and host the digital product you can use Canva, Gumroad, Podia, Lemonsqueezy, Kajibi, or Skool.

Ok, so once you have sponors coming and and you are monetizing with your own product, you can start building your email list using paid ads since you should be able to get a good ROI.

To do this, you can create different types of ad creatives and send them to your lead magnets. Depending on the platform and who you are targeting, it can cost $0.5 to $12 to get subscribers.

Dan