Grow and monetize a newsletter business

In this guide, you will learn how to grow a newsletter in one hour per day using a simple Instagram reels strategy without showing your face and how to monetize without your own product.

In less than 10 minutes, I will show you the strategy I used, and still use, to grow on Instagram to 100k followers in 5 months and monetize it without showing my face in the content.

(I show my face in the thumbnail, but you don’t have to)

This is the exact strategy that has allowed me to start earning $1k per month just from referring other newsletters. I also monetize with digital products and affiliate, giving me an additional $1k per month.

(my earnings for recommending other newsletters. the drop off is because I turned it off temporarily)

It is also how I am growing my newsletter by 300 or more people per day:

I started doing this from scratch only 5 months ago, but I could fast track my progress knowing what I know now.

In this course, I am going to teach you.

• How to grow on Instagram using a simple strategy that takes less than 60 minutes per day.

• How to use Instagram to grow a newsletter by posting simple 8 second reels without showing your face

• How to quickly monetize the newsletter by just recommending other newsletters (you can use this to start making money in only a few days)

• How to also monetize with sponsorships, affiliate, and digital products.

• How to automate everything

• How to choose your niche

• As well as tips to avoid common mistakes people make.

What is a newsletter?

A newsletter is where you send out emails about a particular topic to a list of people who have given you their email in order to receive your emails.

The nice thing is that you can create a newsletter about almost anything.

Examples of newsletter niches can include:

• Fitness

• Dogs or other pets

• Sports

• Cooking

• Investing

… or pretty much any other topic.

Why newsletters are so powerful

Newsletters have a number of very significant advantages over other business models.

The biggest advantage of a newsletter business is that you own the audience. So, you don’t have to worry about Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, etc banning you or reducing your reach.

In addition, there are a lot of monetization opportunities available to newsletter businesses:

• You can monetize with affiliate offers where you get paid for recommending other products in your newsletter, then you get paid a commission for recommending them.

• Newsletter ads such as with the Beehiiv Ad network where you make money for showing an ad in the newsletter

• Sponsorships where companies pay you for linking to them in the newsletter

• Referrals where you show a popup for other newsletters after someone signs up to yours. You get paid a commission for each engaged signup to other newsletters

• Your own digital products

• As well as coaching, SaaS, and services

Another advantage of a newsletter is that it is easy to automate. Once you have the acquisition system setup (which i am about to show you) and a system for writing newsletter posts, it is very easy to either automate using AI or get someone to do it for you.

Also, because of the advantages above, you can generally sell newsletters for a large exit.

The strategy

The strategy to making money from a newsletter as easily and quickly as possible will be to:

• Choose your niche

• Start growing an audience for that niche on Instagram (or another social platform but I recommend Instagram and you will see why shortly)

• Create a lead magnet to get people to want to join your email list (or use premade lead magnets)

• Immediately monetize with paid recommendations

• (optional) create a paid product

• Find affiliate programs in your niche

• Create a welcome sequence to promote the affiliate programs and paid programs

• Once your newsletter reaches a certain size (5k+ subscribers) start reaching out to brands for sponsorship

Choose a niche

First, you need to choose a niche.

The best way to find a niche that would work is to simply browse Instagram for topics that you are interested in. If you can find large accounts in that niche that are monetizing well, you can consider the niche as validated. Also, if it is working on Instagram, it will also be great for a newsletter.

Here are some examples of niches

Productivity

The first example is productivity and selling Notion templates. In this niche you create content about Notion and productivity, then you promote your free notion templates in the reels. After they get the free Notion templates, you then promote your paid templates as an upsell on Gumroad and to your email list. The Notion templates niche also does well on Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, and Tiktok so you can have a lot of diversification in this niche.

Fitness

A common niche that people choose is the fitness niche. In this niche, you would create content about the gym and diet tips. To monetize in this niche, it is common to do coaching and affiliate and sponsorships. You can monetize with digital programs.

Travel

The Travel niche. In this niche, you can get a lot of views by creating viral content about different locations. To monetize in this niche you can do affiliate marketing where you link to hotels, holiday packages or travel items such as bags. You can also do sponsored posts and you can make digital products such as travel guides for different locations.

Pets

The pet niche is a niche where you can go viral quite easily. What you do is take viral and emotional experiences with pets and turn them into 8 second reels.

You can then monetize by selling pet products, by getting people onto your email list using Manychat and then you can monetize with sponsorships and ads.

AI

In the AI niche you can get a lot of views for sharing AI tools and AI news. You can monetize with sponsorships and AI guides.

Setup the newsletter

Now, you need to setup the newsletter.

I recommend that you use Beehiiv

They have built in boosts which is where you can monetize by recommending other newsletters and they will also send you advertisment opportunities even when your newsletter is small.

So, you can start making money quickly with Beehiiv.

The setup process is very easy on Beehiiv, you just need to enter the details for your newsletter, then you are good to go.

Grow audience

To grow on Instagram, you just need to post 8 second reels that are based on viral topics in your niche.

To create the reels, you can use the program Capcut and just overlay text on top of some footage. To get the footage, you can use Hissocialstocks or Hersocialstocks, or you can find niche specific footage on Pinterest.

Here is the easiest way to quickly grow an audience on Instagram. Using this method, you can quickly have a reel go viral and get a lot of signups for your newsletter.

The method is simply to recreate reels that have recently gone viral for your competitors in your niche. Because they went viral for your competitors, there is a high chance that they will go viral for you as well.

When doing this, you should combine the reel with a trending audio to increase your chances to go viral.

The nice thing about this method is that it can be done quickly. You just need to make sure to recreate viral reels that are easy to recreate.

Once you have reels go viral for you, you then make new variations of them because they are likely to go viral for you as well.

You can make the new variations very quickly as well.

So, from there it is just a case of sniping reels that have recently gone viral and continuing to remake new variations of your own reels that have gone viral.

This is a very effective method and you can do it in less than an hour per day. Even 30 minutes. Just don’t make your own versions of reels that are hard to make.

If you look at most of the large accounts on Instagram. That are not from celebrities, they are using this exact strategy. They recreate reels that went viral for their competitors. Then they keep making new variations of their own reels that went viral.

Creating and sending people to Lead magnets

Once you are getting some views on Instagram, you just need to send your audience to your lead magnets where they will signup to your newsletter.

Lead magnets are simply guides or resources that would be useful for your audience. You can create your own lead magnets or use done for you lead magnets that I have made here.

To create lead magnets, you can use Canva or Notion. You can also use ChatGPT to help you.

Once you have made your lead magnets, you need to setup a landing page for them. To do this on Beehiiv:

• Go to settings → publication

• Then subscribe forms

• Fill out the details to create the subscribe form

• Then create a new post

• Hide it from feed

• And use the html embed option to embed the widget into the post

Once you have made the lead magnet you need to send people to it from Instagram.

To do this you can use the program Manychat. This is an application that automatically sends people a link, in the DMs on Instagram, when they comment a certain word.

So, what you need to do is tell people to comment a certain word, in your Instagram reels, to get your lead magnet and setup Manychat to automatically send the link.

Setup boosts to get money for referrals

To setup boosts to start making money for referrals:

• Go to the monetization tab on Beehiiv

• Then click “Explore offers”

• Then apply to all of the newsletters that are related to yours

• Then go to settings → publication

• Go to widgets

• Make sure that “Email submission via Subscribe Form” is selected

Grow the email list

At this point, you have the monetization setup for the referrals, so you should focus on just growing the email list until you get a few thousand subscribers

Schedule newsletter emails

Once you have subscribers, you need to start sending out newsletter emails. I will make a new post later in the series about how you can do this easily.

Monetization

Once you have subscribers, you can then start adding monetization opportunities.

The first way to do this is with affiliate marketing. This is where you recommend products from other companies and get paid a commission if someone uses it.

What you should do is search on Google for affiliate programs in your niche, then put the affiliate links into your lead magnets, welcome sequence (more below), and in regular emails.

The next option is with sponsorships. This is where companies pay you to feature them in your newsletter. The easiest way to get sponsorships is simply by using the Beehiiv Ad Network. This is where they send you ad opportunities and you just need to insert it into the newsletter.

Alternatively, you can reach out to brands that are sponsoring your competitors and ask for a sponsorship too. Typically newsletters get about $10 to $50 for every 1000 opens on their emails.

The next option is with your own digital products. Digital products are great because they have near 100% margins and the delivery is completely automated. Digital products include ebooks, templates, courses, and communities.

To create digital products, you can use Canva, Notion, or Skool (for communities).

To host and sell the digital products, you can use Gumroad, Lemonsqueezy, Podia or Kajibi.

Automation

The final stage is automation. This is where you automate the process of your newsletter as much as possible.

I will have a larger guide on this later in the course. However, you can automate by creating an automated welcome sequence, ChatGPT prompts to write your newsletter posts, automate reaching out to sponsors, and reduce the time it takes to create social media content with systems and ChatGPT.

I have an in depth course that covers everything involved in growing and automating a digital product business and newsletter, called the Digital Creator 2.0.