This is a written version of my presentation at the New Media Summit live event. While this is my original content, I used an A.I. tool to summarize my presentation and turn it into an article. You can get the recording from my talk and all other talks at the event here. I hope you enjoy!
Many people think the secret to building a great digital media business or newsletter business is buying cheap leads on Meta or Google. They’re wrong. The way to win isn’t to get the lowest cost per lead — it’s to make your sign-ups so profitable that you can advertise almost anywhere and still make money.
That’s what this article is about. I’m going to walk you through three things: maximizing the moment of greatest attention, turning your list into a money-printing machine, and filling up your top of funnel with new leads.
Act One: Maximizing the Moment of Greatest Attention
Here’s a question for you: when are your leads most engaged with your content? Is it when they first sign up? After they’ve been reading for a week? After they buy their first product?
The answer is that the most interested a subscriber will ever be in your content is the moment they are signing up for your list. You have to maximize it and get everything you can from the sign-up while you have their attention.
Turn One Opt-In into Four or Five
On your landing page, you’re probably only getting a single opt-in for your email list. But what if you could get a lead to sign up for your primary email list, your secondary email list, your SMS list, browser notifications, and your YouTube channel all at the same time? That lead would be worth dramatically more to you.
At MarketBeat, we collect both email and phone number on our landing page, trigger a browser push notification opt-in, and include a disclosure at the bottom that the subscriber will also get a free subscription to our second email list on a separate ESP. When you sign people up for two email lists at once, you can email them twice as often. And if you send good content, they won’t even care.
Bonus Tip: “Download Now” is a great button text. We’ve tested everything we can think of, and “Download Now” seems to outperform everything when you are advertising a lead magnet.
No, not every lead will sign up for every channel, but a lot of them will. Since you have more ways to communicate with your audience, that means more potential monetization touchpoints and more money.
Your Thank You Page Is Gold
The most valuable real estate on your website is your newsletter sign-up thank you page. Your “Thank You” page is at minimum 20 times more valuable than any other page on your website.
You could put an Ezoic or Google AdSense banner on it and get $150 for every 1,000 people that visit. But even that would be a poor use of your thank you page. If all you’re doing is asking people to go check for your confirmation email, you are leaving money on the table.
It’s not uncommon for MarketBeat to make $3.00 for every person who subscribes to our newsletter and lands on our thank you page. How do we do this? We have a five-page funnel that includes co-registration ad units and lead generation ads for our advertisers.
We usually run AfterOffers (a financial coreg network) on page one, then other click-to-optin ads on pages two through five. In the finance space, Investing Media Solutions is a good option. For everyone else, Sparkloop is kind of the only decent game in town these days.
Think about the math: if a lead costs you $8.00 on Meta or Google (which is what a good financial lead costs) and you’re making $3.00 back before they ever truly make it onto your email list, you’re sitting pretty good. The user who is most likely to take an action on your website or buy something is the user who most recently took an action.
Post-Coreg: Sell Your Own Product
After the last page of your sign-up path, send the user to whatever product or service you sell internally. For us, that’s our premium subscription product, MarketBeat All Access.
Act One Summary
- The moment of greatest attention is when someone first opts in. Use it.
- Collect four opt-ins on your landing page: Email, Email 2, SMS, and Push.
- Maximize revenue on your thank you path with co-reg and digital product sales.
Act Two: Turning Your List into a Money-Printing Machine
Okay, someone has signed up for your various lists. You’ve squeezed all the value out of them on your thank you path. Now they’re a subscriber. How do you make money from your email list?
Ten Ways to Make Money from Your Email List
- Co-Registration Ads — Ads for other newsletters and email lists. This is Sparkloop or AfterOffers.
- Leadshare Deals — Someone pays you for a copy of every email sign-up on your list. In finance, it’s not uncommon to get $1.50 to $2.50 per lead.
- Ezoic/AdSense/Display Ads — Use your email and SMS lists to send people to your website where display ads generate revenue. We use Ezoic and have found it outperforms AdSense.
- Newsletter Sponsorships — Sold directly or on Beehiiv’s Ad Network. Someone pays a flat fee or cost per click to be featured in your newsletter.
- CPA Affiliate Deals — Make a deal with relevant advertisers where they pay you per sale you generate. These are a great way to know if your paid campaigns are generating actual sales, not just subscribers.
- Premium Subscriptions — Sell a premium version of your newsletter. Our first product was MarketBeat Daily Premium, a $149/year subscription that was a better version of our free newsletter.
- Sell Information Products — Sell a PDF guide, a course, or a book. This is one-time work that tends to generate passive income over time.
- Sell Your Time — I put a consulting offer out on X in December and got 25 people to pay $3,000 for an hour of my time. If you have an audience, people will pay good money for one-on-one access with you.
- A.I. Licensing Deals — License your content to the A.I. platforms. We work with LexisNexis, which bundles our content with others and sells it to OpenAI and other AI companies.
- Cross-Channel Promotion — Use your email list to drive traffic to your SMS list, your YouTube channel, or other media channels that generate revenue.
Finding Advertisers
There are services like Who Sponsors Stuff that list people already buying newsletter ads, but advertisers in their database get hammered several times per day by salespeople and A.I. bots. I know this because I get the emails. It’s a total red ocean.
Here’s what I recommend instead: install Google AdSense on your website, then use their ad review center to see who is already advertising on your site. The best part is it shows which ads are appearing most frequently. If it’s profitable for an advertiser to advertise on your website, it’s profitable for them to advertise to your email list. It’s a great way to build a prospect list.
If you’re just getting started and don’t have the capacity for direct sales, don’t be afraid to go to Commission Junction, ClickBank, or ShareASale. There are advertisers on these affiliate networks that you can link to in your newsletter with basically no barrier to entry.
Don’t Be Afraid to Send Emails
Everyone that knows MarketBeat knows we send out a lot of emails. Many would say too many. I would say not nearly enough.
Here’s the deal: if you want to be seen by your subscribers, you have to be seen in their inbox. A typical active inbox gets as many as 500 emails per week.
If you send one email a week, your market share in your subscriber’s inbox is 0.2%. If you send one per day, it’s 1.4%. In our case, we’d like to be 5% of all the emails in a subscriber’s inbox. If you are only sending weekly, you are simply not mailing enough.
One of my portfolio companies was sending one email per week. They went to three emails per week and doubled their revenue just by emailing more often.
Yes, there will be diminishing returns as you send more emails, but as everyone’s favorite business guru Alex Hormozi says, diminishing returns are still returns. So send emails. Send them often. And don’t feel bad about it.
Stop Worrying About Unsubscribes
A common question newsletter operators ask is “What’s the right mix of content and promotional email?” or “What happens if I send promotional email and people unsubscribe?” Frankly, these are just the wrong questions.
Two things to remember:
- Your email list exists to make your business money. If your emails aren’t making you money, what are we even doing here?
- 99.99% of the world is not subscribed to your list. Who cares if a few people go from “subscribed” to “unsubscribed” because they got some ads and didn’t like it? You don’t care about the people who aren’t interested in your stuff — you care about the people who are interested.
Use Triggered Email Campaigns
Triggered emails are messages that get sent to your users when they open one of your newsletters or click a link. The idea is that you send your audience a content email, and if they open it, you send them another message right away while they’re still in their inbox.
In my experience, you’ll get a 60% to 70% open rate on that second message and a much higher than average click-through rate. Think about what that does for your deliverability when you have campaigns regularly getting 70% open rates. That tells ESPs not only do people want your messages, but they open them right away.
Since the triggered email gets a high open rate, you can be more aggressive with it — hard sales messages, third-party affiliate advertising — and get away with it.
We built custom software to do this dynamically, but you can do something very similar on Beehiiv using what’s been called the “make money button.” The idea is that you create a tight segment of people who have opened multiple emails in the last seven days or clicked recently, then put them in a sequence with your best offers. That way you are selling to people when they are most ready to buy. Matt McGarry has done a good job of popularizing this idea — look for his YouTube video on the Beehiiv make money button.
Sunsetting Is the Key to Deliverability
As people stay on your list longer, some will lose interest and stop engaging. If someone hasn’t opened emails in a while, you want to quietly stop emailing them to keep your engagement metrics strong with the ESPs.
Create two sending segments:
- Daily Segment (your most active users):
- Added in the last 7 days
- Opened in the last 30 days
- Clicked in the last 60 days
- Weekly Segment (less active, trying to reactivate):
- Added in the last 30 days
- Opened in the last 90 days
- Clicked in the last 180 days
You really want to target a ~45% open rate in Beehiiv or Kit. If your numbers are lower, tighten your segments. If your open rate is higher, your segments are too tight and you should loosen them up. Chris Miquel’s “base sending segment” guide is an excellent resource for setting these up.
Don’t Sleep on SMS
If you have landing pages and are already driving traffic to generate email sign-ups, you might as well do an SMS opt-in too. It doesn’t really hurt your conversion rate if you do it right, and it gives you another way to communicate with your audience.
About 20% of our email opt-ins also sign up for SMS. Here’s the thing: SMS opt-ins are 10X–20X more valuable than email sign-ups. Yes, it’s more expensive. Yes, there’s a higher compliance bar (TCPA). But it’s totally worth it.
We currently make just about as much money on our SMS list as we do on our email list — and our SMS list is 10% the size of our email list. SMS messages get nearly a 100% open rate and are a great way to generate sales. We have people who will click on a link in an SMS message, watch a 45-minute video sales letter, and purchase a financial newsletter.
We send the same ads to our SMS list that we send to our email list — we just use the subject line and then the advertiser’s link. SMS today is like email was 10 years ago. It just works.
We use Twilio for SMS, but you need to be a developer to really use it well. A lot of people in finance use Lime Cellular, which is a good place to start.
Act Two Summary
- There are ten distinct ways to make money from your email list — use multiple.
- Find advertisers using AdSense ad review, Who Sponsors Stuff, and affiliate networks.
- Don’t be afraid to send more email. Frequency matters.
- Use triggered email campaigns to sell to people when they’re most engaged.
- Use both SMS and email to maximize revenue.
Act Three: Filling Your Top of Funnel with New Leads
I intentionally covered monetization first because monetization is your key to growth. If your subscribers are printing you cash, it’s pretty easy to do media buying.
Your Funnel and Monetization Matter More Than Your Advertising Campaigns
Most of us think the secret to effective advertising on Meta or Google is finding a killer media buyer. The reality is that a lot of what makes your media buying successful has nothing to do with your ad campaigns.
It’s how good your funnel is at converting traffic into leads and converting leads into customers. If you can have a landing page that converts, an effective coreg path or thank you path, and can consistently monetize your email list, you don’t need to be that great at media buying.
MarketBeat doesn’t have a single media buyer on staff. We have four media buyers, and they’re all freelancers we met at conferences — a Google buyer, a Meta/TikTok buyer, a second Meta buyer, and a newsletter ad buyer. They’re all good at what they do, but they don’t have to be world-class or work miracles because we have a great funnel that monetizes well.
We currently advertise on Google, Meta, TikTok, Taboola, Criteo, and Bing and are profitable on all these platforms. We’re at about $1.4 million per month in spend and growing that number every month. My goal is to grow by $100K per month and spend $20 million on advertising this year.
Paid Is Where the Scale Is
There’s an upper limit on how many people will fill out an opt-in form on your website organically. Let’s say you get 1 million unique visitors per month. If 2% opt in, you’re getting 20,000 opt-ins per month. With natural churn of about 5%, your email list will never grow beyond 400,000 subscribers.
Getting to 400,000 is a huge success for most people, but it’s typically not enough to generate eight figures in revenue. If you want to scale, you have to do paid.
About 80% of the revenue MarketBeat makes comes from email sign-ups that came through paid channels. We have a great SEO presence and get referral traffic from Yahoo Finance, NASDAQ, MSN, Entrepreneur, and other sites, but paid traffic is where the scale is. If you want to build a big business, you have to do paid growth.
There’s No Magical Lead Source
The question I kept getting on my consulting calls was “What’s your best traffic source?” and “Which ad network is the most profitable?”
We advertise on all the big networks and the back-end performance for us is very similar regardless of whether we’re on Meta, Google, TikTok, Taboola, or Bing. The only thing that truly stands out is buying ads on other financial newsletters to promote our lead magnets. That works very well, but it’s a hand-to-hand combat media buying approach. You need a good lead magnet, you must reach out to individual list owners, get them to email your lead magnet to their list, and pay them per lead. Works awesome. Hard to do at scale.
If you don’t know where to start and just want to get going, start with Meta ads. There are people like Gunnar Holm and Nathan May who can get starter campaigns going for you.
A warning on cheap leads: co-registration networks and lead generation firms that just give you emails can be tempting, but unless you really know what you’re doing, I’d avoid them. You often get many unengaged emails and it tanks your deliverability. In the finance space, AfterOffers and Investing Media Solutions are decent, but beyond that there aren’t many coreg networks I can recommend to the average newsletter operator.
The Key to Success in Paid Media Is Understanding Your Data
One of many reasons MarketBeat is successful is that we know when a traffic source is sending buyers, not just email sign-ups. We built our own customer data platform to do this. When we generate a sale for one of our advertisers, we can track it back to the person who made the purchase and which traffic source generated the email or SMS sign-up.
So if I know I spent $100,000 on Meta during December and made $200,000 from those leads, I have a profitable ad campaign. This isn’t easy — you typically must build custom software, and you also need your advertisers to either install your tracking pixel on purchase or do conversion postbacks into your platform. But if you can pull it off, it’s basically a cheat code for advertising because you have all the data. You’re not just guessing anymore.
If you’re not at the point of building custom software, there are two potential solutions:
- HYROS — Some people have used this to do something similar, although it does get complaints about being too expensive.
- Beehiiv — It gives open rate and click-through data by channel, and if you sell a product through Beehiiv, it gives you purchase data by channel as well. For an ESP, this is top-notch technology and more people should use it.
The key is to have some way to understand which traffic sources are generating sales. If you can get that data, it’s a cheat code for media buying because you know with certainty what campaigns are working and which ones aren’t.
Act Three Summary
- Your subscriber funnel and list monetization game matter as much or more than your advertising campaigns.
- Paid advertising is how you scale your media business to eight figures. Organic alone won’t get you there.
- There is no magical place to buy good, cheap leads. Most major platforms perform similarly.
- The key to success in paid media is understanding your data and tracking sales back to lead sources.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to be a world-class media buyer. But you do need a great funnel and a list monetization strategy that turns your subscribers into cash. If you have those two things and can track sales data back to individual lead sources, just about any competent media buyer will be able to buy profitably for your list.
Maximize the moment of greatest attention. Monetize aggressively with multiple channels and revenue streams. Then pour fuel on the fire with paid growth backed by real data. That’s how you build a media business that scales.