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After being made redundant a few years ago, I started to look into a very specific online money making model – the online newsletter startup… of creating a newsletter that offered a good read and would help me build up my very own list.

How to Create an Online Newsletter Startup

I figured that, by giving the newsletter away free, and making sure it was as interesting and informative as I could, my subscribers wouldn’t mind if I put the odd little ad in each week that would make me a few dollars if someone bought what it promoted.

So it was that in 2001 I launched an email newsletter.

I have now written well over 1,300 issues and, in just three to four hours a week, my newsletter, Kickstart, makes me a very healthy six-figure income.

Now I love my life. The corporate nightmare days are long behind me, we’ve moved to a beautiful home and I no longer have a mortgage. There is money in the bank and if for some reason I don’t write my newsletter on any particular day, my readers write to ask if I’m okay!

But, to be honest, I don’t feel as if I’ve done a day’s work since this all began. It is way too much fun to be called work. There is nothing hard about what I do – anyone can learn to do it.

That’s the happy ending to my story – except it isn’t the end by any means. There is no sign that this particular business model will dry up – as the economy has worsened, it has actually increased business as more people buy things online.

Now, of course, I do all kinds of Internet marketing, but online newsletter publishing is always where my heart is and in answer to the often asked question,:“If you lost everything and had to start over with nothing apart from your knowledge, what would you do?” I would have to say that I’d start another newsletter.

Incidentally, I prefer the term newsletter to ezine because it seems to me to imply something with a bit more substance than a lot of the ezines you see in your inbox. And substance is one of the secrets that I have learned over the years.

A real business without overheads

If you’re looking for a real business that you can build online that is simple to start and easy (and fun) to maintain, then your own newsletter could be the very thing you are looking for. It has the added benefit of being virtually without overheads. My accountant is always amazed that my costs are so low and my profits so high!

You don’t need any experience, but having someone who has done it all successfully to guide you through the pitfalls is very helpful. I made every mistake in the book and invented a few more of my own and have learned that a lot of what is published in how-to ebooks and courses is just rehashed received wisdom: good on paper, but totally useless in practice.

What you do need to understand is that being a newsletter writer/publisher is not about sending out offer after offer, pitch after pitch to the unlucky people that you’ve managed to trick into signing up to receive your emails. That’s the best way to lose your subscribers (at best) or to have them permanently ignore what you send them. Being ignored is the worst because you have no feedback, no idea why your list isn’t responding.

Two pillars of newsletter success

There is a very high failure rate among new online newsletter startups. Many people see the promise but don’t understand how to be successful. They don’t know that there are two things you have to get right from the very start: you have to learn how to communicate, and you have to learn how to build their trust.

Success as a newsletter writer is all about effective communication. You have to be able to write interesting, useful, friendly stuff that your readers will look forward to receiving and reading. Because, even though the real name of the game is to get people to buy something, they can’t buy if they haven’t opened your email and read it.

Nobody will willingly buy anything from somebody they don’t trust, no matter how entertaining their writing may be. Trust cannot be bought or created, it has to be earned.

But get the communication right, and educate your readers to know that you can be trusted and have their best interests at heart, and the result will be a newsletter that can make you a significant full- time income in little more than a morning’s “work” each week.

It is very difficult to succeed if you have bought into the myth that you can send almost anything to your list and they’ll line up to send you money. There is a lot more to making a living from a newsletter than sending out pre-written affiliate ads day after day. But unfortunately for them, that’s exactly what so many beginners do – and then get quickly disillusioned because many people unsubscribe and the remainder don’t buy.

Tips for newsletter success

Meanwhile, if you are already writing a newsletter and it isn’t making as much money as you’d like, here are a few tips to help get you on the right track.

The one word that you really need to understand is PROSE.

PROSE is what makes a newsletter great.

P stands for Personal

Too many people think that writing should be on topic and focused. It is true that if your newsletter is about golf, or knitting or Internet marketing, it should contain content to suit. But not all your content has to be about your core topic.

I discovered very early on that when I went off- topic and wrote about something personal – my kids, a movie we’d seen, or events from everyday life, my subscribers engaged far more. Emails to me increased, and sales of products recommended in those issues went up.

People like to read about people (as social networking sites like Facebook have proved) and so by introducing a personal element into your writing you become real to them.

R stands for Relaxed

By relaxed, I mean don’t worry about perfect grammar, or even think about writing in formal English. Write as you would speak.

Sentences can begin with And or Because. Infinitives can be split. Keep your words simple, your sentences short, your paragraphs loose and avoid big chunks of wordy text.

The only thing to be careful with is spelling. Some people are very turned off by poor spelling, but nobody notices good spelling, so make the spell checker your friend and try to proof read everything before you send it out.

O is for Often

New writers worry about overloading their readers, but the truth is that you can publish every single day and nobody will complain – provided what you are sending out is interesting.

Don’t worry about overloading your readers, but do worry about boring them.

My newsletter used to be published five times a week and the only complaints I received were when I cut down to three times a week.

S represents Solo

By solo I mean that when you sit down to write, just as I’m doing now, you need to believe that you are writing to one person only.

You’re that one person right now.

I’m not sure why, but when you start to imagine thousands of people reading what you are writing, the way you phrase things, the general tone that you take and the words you use subtly change. And your connection to your reader can be easily lost.

E stands for...

When I present at seminars I like to ask the audience what they think E stands for.

There are always good answers: Educational, Entertaining, Emotive, Evergreen, Earnest, Eccentric, Editing, Empathy, Enchanting.

All are excellent candidates, but are not, in my opinion the most important E. Sadly, nobody has yet called out...

Ethical

If there is such a thing as the biggest secret that I’ve learned to online success, it is to behave ethically at all times.

As I mentioned earlier, you start to make real money with a newsletter when your readers learn that you are to be trusted. You gain that trust by never being tempted to lie to your readers, even if you’ll make less money as a result.

Success isn’t always about being the person with the biggest affiliate cheque – it is a lot about being able to sleep at night too. And by writing to your readers as a trusted friend – and meaning it – you may not make as much from today’s promotion, but you certainly will make a lot more over the long term.

So there you have it – PROSE – a neat way to sum up the five key “secrets” of online newsletter success. Use them well and they’ll pay you big dividends.