Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
EP 31 - Dan Barry
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Dan Barry: [00:00:00] If you're running a newsletter or running sales for a newsletter, get in the habit of every time you're scrolling on whatever app is your poison and you see an ad that somewhat would make sense, screenshot it, save it to a folder in your phone or immediately kind of like WhatsApp it to yourself because you're already spending your time scrolling and Yeah, those brands are spending today.
Dylan Redekop: Welcome to the send and grow podcast. I'm your host, Dylan Redekop. In my day job at SparkLoop, I spent all my time analyzing how the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world grow and monetize their audiences. I get a behind the scenes look at how they're growing their newsletters and driving revenue.
And there is so much to learn from their success and from their mistakes. With this podcast, you get that access too. Every week I sit down with a different guest from industry experts to successful operators and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know about so you can become really effective at [00:01:00] growing and monetizing your newsletter.
Today I'm joined on the podcast by newsletter ad sales aficionado Dan Barry. Dan has managed brand partnerships for major media businesses like Finimize and The Daily Upside. Where he was responsible for bringing in over 3 million in ad sales revenue in just over three years. In our chat, we go behind the scenes with Dan, where he shares his step by step process from prospecting to landing your next newsletter advertiser.
You'll also learn how Dan handles objections, what to do when a campaign falls flat and 2024 when it comes to brand partnerships. Dan, thanks for coming on the Send Grow podcast today. I'm really excited to dive into the world of newsletter ad sales. But first, can you tell us a bit about your background in the newsletter ad sales space?
Cheers.
Dan Barry: Thanks Dylan. So, I guess in terms of exposure to newsletter from the beginning to now, I was originally training to be a lawyer at a law firm straight out of uni. [00:02:00] Wasn't for me for various different reasons. Wanted to go into sales for various different reasons again. Uh, and then went to Finemise.
Finemise is selling a variety of different things. Mainly newsletter ad sales, newsletter ad space I was selling and also kind of like content solutions and APIs and then stuff like that. And then in 2022 I moved into the daily upside as their first sales hire and the daily upsides and awesome finance business newsletter, probably looking after their main newsletter.
It was only one newsletter when I joined selling the ad space and they're joined around just over 800. Thousand subscribers, I believe at the time the team was pretty lean. The founder full time growth slash part time outreach person, a couple of different writers and yeah, kind of like applying everything I've learned at Finimize to The Daily Upside, creating copy processes, going out [00:03:00] and doing.
A lot of outreach, which is unavoidable if you're going into sales or running the sales department of a newsletter. And then, yeah, fast forward a year, I left the daily upside for a, for a couple of reasons, absolutely nothing on the daily upside. They're awesome team and awesome company and awesome newsletter, a couple of personal reasons, and then kind of stumbled out of some, some personal chaos and founded Revenews, which is a newsletter, which helps use other operators.
Generate more user to revenue, mainly looking at ad sales. And yeah, I've been doing a few other things, doing some consulting for a few different users, helping them generate more money, mainly looking at what they're currently doing or could be doing with their ad sales operations. Yeah. And then that's kind of brings us to the day.
Dylan Redekop: Very cool. So when it comes to partnerships and identifying and establishing partnerships, what, what are the main things that you look at that make for a successful partnership?
Dan Barry: So. The main things you're [00:04:00] looking at when you're going out trying to find the right brands to reach out to asking in terms of who is going to run an effective campaign or who is going to be from a sales perspective, the most lowest hanging fruit will start with sales.
So the lowest hanging fruit is always going to be people that no one trusts you or the brand, the brand being the company, your newsletter. Let's say you're starting sales tomorrow and you want to go out and try and get your first advertiser, find out who in your network, whether that is your actual friends, your previous colleagues, or.
People in your wider professional network works in a company that would you think would would be a good fit to advertise your news. That's ideally in marketing. You can always, if they're not enough in marketing, ask for a referral to the marketing person. But yes, start with your existing network. The next and kind of.
One of the more obvious places to look as is other newsletters or similar publications and newsletters [00:05:00] is a very great place to start because a brand that is advertised in a similar newsletter to you, let's say you're running a finance newsletter and you want to reach out to brands advertising and other similar finance possible finance, maybe economics or more broad business newsletters.
They're aware of the format of newsletters. They, hopefully the campaign has gone fairly well. So the audience is going to be a fit, assuming the audience is somewhat similar. And if you're reaching out to them within good time, as in close within close proximity to when their campaign went live in newsletter X, then they are actively spending.
Generally, they probably signed that contract a few weeks ago if the placement is going out today. So they're in a period where their marketing budget is open to newsletters or new newsletters. So network newsletters, and then you can kind of look at other different publication formats, podcasts, blogs, websites, ads you see on LinkedIn.
I like LinkedIn because [00:06:00] CPMs and CPC on LinkedIn are really high versus Twitter and meta. So if you see an advert on LinkedIn, you think that brand would work really well. LinkedIn's a more expensive platform, a similar cost to newsletters to Twitter are quite a lot cheaper for impressions and CPCs and therefore acquisitions.
So that conversation can be harder with those platforms and is if you're speaking to the person that wasn't responsible for it. Executing on that LinkedIn ad, they're used to paying, paying a premium for advertising in general, and then you can, depending on how niche your newsletter is, if you're very niche and B2B and or B2B, you can kind of venture outside.
You can more easily venture outside of brands that are already advertising and just kind of look at brands that you know would be awesome. So let's say you're running a, an HR newsletter that is filled with HR professionals, [00:07:00] executives or trainees or students going off to companies which create. Or HR software companies, or that would be the, probably the most obvious example, even if you haven't seen them advertising in a similar channel, because it's such a good fit, it's going to make a lot of sense.
So that's kind of like the order of the lowest hanging fruit that I'd see. It's harder if you're more general because you're more general. Yeah. Like
Dylan Redekop: broad appeal sort of newsletters are a little bit trickier, I'd imagine. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Barry: Let's. Niche can be a bit of a superpower. It can restrict you to your market.
It doesn't have to. But if you're speaking to the right people in your niche, which you definitely should be, you use your niche to your advantage. And you have an awesome, even somewhat small audience of, let's stick with the HR example for no Apparent reason you have 15, 000 HR professionals across the U.
S. and Europe. That's going to be super, super interesting to more [00:08:00] interesting than 200, 000 professionals. And some of them are probably in HR, much more interesting because there are a lot of those audiences and scarcity is on your side. If your nation, especially if you're. B2B and speaking to companies that have a high basket size, which is always something to consider because the economics news after advertising just work better if their average order order value or LTV is in the hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as opposed to a T shirt company and each basket is worth 50 bucks and then they only make Outta that, but your CPMs are 20 or 30.
Right. It just gets very hard to work as a campaign and sell as a campaign, which both are equally as important.
Dylan Redekop: Right. And I I that logically that very much makes sense. I think the interesting points you made there, well it was all very interesting, but the fact that a, a really good, strong signal that somebody's gonna be probably willing to at least entertain a [00:09:00] conversation about.
A advertising partnership would be that they're already advertising. So you mentioned like LinkedIn versus Twitter meta, when you are LinkedIn having higher ad rates, then. Then Twitter and meta, that's where, if you have obviously a higher cost for your ad placements, that would be a better audience to follow.
But I think in general, the fact that somebody's advertising on either of those platforms is, is just a, a good signal that they might be open to that conversation. Right. So people, even with smaller ad rates might not, you know, somebody who's advertising on Twitter or meta might be still a decent candidate for them.
If they're, if their ad placements are a little bit less expensive too, I would imagine. Yeah.
Dan Barry: And just, I wouldn't ignore Facebook, Instagram, Meta, all these rebrands get confusing. I wouldn't ignore them by any stretch of the imagination. If you're running a newsletter or running sales for a newsletter, get in the habit of every time you're scrolling on whatever app is your poison and you see an ad that somewhat would make [00:10:00] sense, screenshot it, save it to a folder in your phone or, or immediately kind of like WhatsApp it to yourself.
I used to WhatsApp it to my girlfriend and spam her. And then at least I'd have it in a, in a channel and a chat I could revisit and I just say ignore and just send her a bunch of investing platforms as advertisers and then reach out to them when I got to my desk, but get in the habit of doing that.
Because you're already spending your time spending slash wasting your time scrolling outside of work time, ideally, and yeah, those brands are spending today, especially if it's on those platforms, because they're obviously they are literally spending today or it was set up very, very recently.
Dylan Redekop: So, let's see, let's see, you find an advertiser who actually returns your cold email or outreach attempt.
Can you walk us through sort of the process of negotiating a partnership in terms of, you don't have to go through intricate detail necessarily, but what, what are those steps involved from, you know, cold outreach to actually launching that
Dan Barry: campaign? So, yeah, in my experience, asking for a call straight away in the, in the [00:11:00] first cold email can work.
It's It's going to generate a much more quality conversation and probably get a better response rate if you lead with a less intrusive, presumptive call to action and specifically a question call to action, something like, would you like me to send a media kit or after you've described your audience in the, in the outreach, does this seem like it's aligned with your audience?
Or you can say. And once you've done your research on the brand, and let's say that they're looking for founders, it's like, are founders part of your ICP? Let me know if I'm way off here. So more of a question based context, question based CTA, which starts a conversation, which you can then convert to a call as in bam, let's get on a call.
It just doesn't get a. As a high response rate in my experience and as a quality as a as many quality responses. So you can ask for a call or layout some information. If they've asked for a media kit, lay [00:12:00] it out. You don't want to lay out pricing straight away because you need to build up value before you convey pricing and how you build up value.
Newsletter ad sales game is to ensure that the audience is a fit, make sure that they trust you. It's, it's got quality numbers in terms of open rate, click through rate. The biggest one for sure is, is audience fit. And the best way to properly determine that is to get them on a call. Spark their interest by feeding them a little bit with hopefully relevant audience information.
And this is where your good prospecting skills comes in handy. But yeah, tailoring the response, obviously if they've asked whatever they've asked for, giving it to them, getting them excited, but not giving them everything. Don't. The first reply and information dump, because if they don't reply, then you've got nothing else to say.
Plus, if it's too long, they won't read the email or they'll just kind of get scared. I'm like, why is this person sending me seven paragraphs? So just quick relevant [00:13:00] fact in a nicely formatted way. And so if this sounds relevant, we should definitely explore on a call later this week, early next week.
Suggest some times if they don't reply to that. which happens a lot, if not most of the time, then follow up and assume that they're the kind of person that wants to stick to email, which for small sub five, $10k media buys. A lot of the deals are just done over email. Getting on a call is always advantageous because you can ask the right question, understand their goals, understand their target audience to then pitch your product and your audience, your newsletter to them.
Better than if you were just going off your assumptions, but if you are fully committed to getting on the call and then kind of neglect an email conversation, you're, you're going to put a lot of people off and lose a lot of deals, which could have been done with people just over email. The smaller the media by the less likely they are to [00:14:00] want to get on a call.
I think it's time invested in this and if it's only Sub 5k depending on the brand, of course, but like a smallish Sub 5k media by while they might be really really interested. It might not be worth getting on a half an hour cool for but then let's say you you got an Got a positive response. You've replied.
They've jumped on a call. Obviously, make sure that you're leading with a lot of questions, trying to really understand who their target audience is, what their goals are, what their KPIs are, have they advertised in previous newsletters, how did that go? All those juicy informations, what's their team's target?
Are they in demand generation? Are they in lead generation? Are they in brand awareness? Are they in user acquisition? Are they a growth marketer? What's their Individual goals, not all of these questions, of course, but like really try and understand who they are, what their team's goals are, what their company goals are audiences that is probably the biggest [00:15:00] one understanding the goals and audience and then you can pitch your audience and obviously framing it to match their target audience whilst keeping obviously everything true and the data correct, there will be two sides of a if it's a finance or a Kind of broad economic newsletter.
There's often like the investing side of your audience and that's their income stats How many are accredited etc, and there's the b2b side of your audience Their job titles, what industries they're in, and obviously you want to showcase the most relevant one. And within that, there's more details and nuance within the investing side.
You want to talk more about if it's a crypto brand, but about that, if it's a stock brand, if you have the data about what kind of stocks or ETFs are interested in, et cetera, so you want to get as much information from them to pitch. Appropriately pitch, describe your audience, get them excited about a campaign, how you approach your campaigns, the operations of your campaigns, close out the call with [00:16:00] acquiring.
That budget, ideally in a dollar amount, or if they're reluctant to say a dollar amount, which is quite often the case, you can lay out your pricing, say a primary is X, a secondary is Y. We usually like to start with a package of four to six. Does that sound digestible to you? And you can, a lot of brands and people are hesitant to lay out.
A dollar amount when you ask for the budget, but you can ask it in a, in a roundabout way, which is more approachable and digestible for them. So you want to get that budget, but you want to get a timeline. If they have a timeline in mind, then you can act accordingly on the back of it. Ideally, especially if it's a bigger company, you want to get that decision making process.
And that is. If it's the CEO of a 20 person SaaS startup, probably less important because they're going to make the final decision. Same with if it's a CMO. But as soon as you get to a company which has more than one marketing person in, then that becomes a lot more [00:17:00] important. And obviously the bigger the company, the more complex decision making processes can be.
You can go through two, three different approvals. And then once you get into. Huge enterprise companies. Most of those are looked the most of their marketing budgets are looked after by agencies, which is another layer of annoying complications. Annoying for salespeople. Great for the company. Another layer of complications and people and.
Bureaucracies to navigate key things, get on the back of the call to close out a cool budget timeline, decision making process, send a proposal in line with the sales conversation on the back of that. Don't be afraid to follow up, follow up accordingly if it's it's now. December, if it's a Q2 campaign, don't follow up every two days for four months.
That's obviously going to piss them off. But if, if there was a chance that they wanted to get it off the ground before Christmas, which Christmas is in 19 days [00:18:00] now, then maybe you probably do want to follow up every two days, act accordingly, basically. And then when it comes down to the kind of options, Typically, laying out three options will, in theory, make them want to go for the middle one.
So if you have a small and a big option you were originally talking about in the call, in the pitch, which is quite a common occurrence, you'd kind of like them to go for the bigger one, lay out a small, medium, and then like a ridiculously large package. And that will help anchor them to Larger prices and human nature and psychology, they're quite likely to pick the middle one, especially if they go upwards, because if they go upwards for a decision, they're going to be looking at this and more from more of a risk management perspective than the person you've spoken to, because they know you and trust you a bit more and second, if it's a larger media by or Generally, a bigger company or a complicated, more, more complicated [00:19:00] deal with more moving parts, jumping on a second call can be super, super helpful.
If you think that it will be required, ideally get that call booked in, in the first call saying, I'll send you a proposal. Shall we catch up in two weeks and iron out all the details? Then you're at least you haven't sent a proposal and you're just chasing and chasing and chasing. You sent a proposal and the default position is you are talking to them two weeks and it's not chasing.
It's sending more information, but, uh, kind of going about this in a not too linear way. But once you send a proposal, follow up, try and add value in your followups and add value is such a buzzword, but showcase more. New information, a case study here, another audience stat that there, a recent newsletter, which we're talking about a topic which they might be interested in by nature of their role or company.
Don't just send an email that is saying, [00:20:00] have you seen my proposal yet? What do you think? Try and make it showcasing more information and adding value to their life.
Dylan Redekop: Okay. And I think you've laid out some really good steps. From kind of start to basically getting to the point where we're following up and, and sealing a deal, we've, we've offered them three ad options, ad packages, and trying to anchor them to the middle one.
Let's say they've, they've come back to you saying, yeah, it looks good. Let's go for it. And you run the ad and then you get, they do not get the result they're after. Uh, which I think is at least for me, just in, in my experience, running ads in newsletters. That's always been a fear like, you know, I'm, I'm charging X amount and I hope I can get the, the value for the, the client.
So what do you do in the case where the ad hasn't performed to the, to their expectation or to maybe what you, not that you promised, but what you, you know, kind of led them to believe it might be the case. And how do you deal with those challenges?
Dan Barry: Sure. I guess I can start with the things that you can do [00:21:00] before you get.
The pre sales things you can do, and then the post sales things you can do. So the pre sales, obviously, make sure you're trying to reach out to the most relevant brands who you genuinely think will do well and your readers will like. That being said, you do want some kind of diversity in your brand partners in terms of industry.
You don't just want investing platforms or B2B solutions with. Productivity tools you do on a spectrum, but at least make sure that you think there's a good chance that will go well, of course, goes about saying managing expectations is really important. You obviously want to sell and present data and numbers which make them by, but you also don't want to inflate those numbers.
You need to make everything super, super clear if you're sharing. Case study, which is like the top, one of your top performers, maybe mentioned that as a caveat include ranges and just be super honest and [00:22:00] transparent with all your communications and try and manage expectations where possible with CTR quotes because CTRs can massively vary depending on the product, the weather, how people are feeling the copy, all of the above, none of the above.
Just make sure you, you mentioned that, but once it has happened and a partner is unhappy with how the performance has gone, I mean, even well crafted marketing campaigns to the right audience, well over 50 percent of them don't succeed and success is the reason defined by. The market to themselves, so don't take that as my newsletters, rubbish.
This brand is rubbish or this type of product isn't going to go. Well, most marketing campaigns around the world, even if they're done well, don't succeed. I hit the target KPIs. That's just a fact of life in the same way that most sales don't [00:23:00] succeed. A 20 percent conversion rate from pitch to a one deal is good.
So that means that 80%. You're gonna lose those deals, even if you're doing a fairly decent job. So don't get emotional about it. Don't take it to heart. Don't kind of get too defensive over it. Assuming that you've done everything well on time and executed the campaign properly. Best way to approach it is, is to really.
Have an honest look at the campaign, the copy, the timing, the image, the angle, the feature or product that you focus on. Was it educational? Was it too salesy? Uh, try and suggest ways that, that it could. Be better. If you're trying genuinely to do that and not just coming from a let's try and do this. So they've rebook, then it will obviously become across a lot more organic and genuine.
Obviously you want to sell, but if you can just do that. [00:24:00] Genuinely focus on the campaign and not even mention a renewal if they're annoyed or not even heavily mentioned The prospect of we'll do this better next time. Do you want to discuss rebooking? Um, right.
Dylan Redekop: Let me ask you a follow up if they've booked a A package deal and the first ad's that just like dramatically underperforms.
Have you ever dealt with a situation where they want to pull, pull it out, the deal altogether, the rest of the ads.
Dan Barry: So that specific scenario, I think I've dealt with that once or twice. Most marketers know and understand that it's going to take. More than one touch point to drive significant results, especially if those results are new users or opened accounts.
So most marketers won't make comprehensive conclusions after just one touch point, or at least they shouldn't. Some do and get very, they've seen absolutely zero traction and zero engagement. That can happen, and you just need to kind of say, Okay, obviously, that's [00:25:00] come well under your expectations. Lay out exactly what you've seen, open rate and click rate is basically the stats that you have to lean on your end.
Lay out what you've seen, whether that's good or bad from Your perspective and then try. Let's just put our best foot forward for this next copy. Let's try a different angle. Let's talk more about this because this campaign has gone well with this brand that was quite similar. And we talked about this product or feature of them.
So let's lean into that. That kind of circles back to what we just talked about. Genuinely trying to improve the campaign. If you assuming you've signed an I. O. And it's a 10 placement campaign and you've got nine to go. Obviously canceling it is Mhm. Probably not going to be in the contract depends on how you positioned yourself and in the contract, but cancelling it off after one placement isn't going to be kind of like within the contract and generally not be reasonable anyway.
So, yeah, just generally trying to focus on what to do. Better next, but [00:26:00] also being understanding and polite and friendly and all those, all that jazz.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah. It's a fine line of balancing expectations, trying to sell the ad package yet, you know, balancing expectations that, you know, the first placement might not be a rousing success and.
And yet still trying to, to make sure that they sign on or, or especially if you believe in, in the fit with your brand, their brand and your newsletter. So that's, that's good advice. Oh, I want to ask you our partnerships, ad sales. Um, are they right for every newsletter? I know there's a lot of people who are listening who probably have either had experience with, with ads and maybe not a great experience.
There's probably a lot of people also who have just never really thought of that as a monetization strategy. So what, what, what's your take? Like if you were. If you were to kind of, you know, paint everybody with the same stroke, which we shouldn't do, but are our ad placements right for, for any newsletter?
And if not, why?
Dan Barry: Assuming that the classic morning brew type flat fee sponsorship model. [00:27:00] Is great. Can be awesome. Can be a really effective and scalable business. It works really well for quality, but broad audiences like the Morning Brew or Daily Upside or Finimize where it becomes less of a great Revenue stream is where your newsletter is smaller, more niche or a less valuable audience.
The CPMs you can charge will obviously potentially be lower. Your total list size, if you're super, super, super niches is just never going to be an amount which you can charge thousands per ad slot. Maybe it only goes out twice a week and you're, you're capped by how many times you send out a week and the CPMs you can charge.
So the flat fees, one trip model. Is definitely a fantastic model for audiences which have the capability to either be super valuable. Like an axios pro rata or a [00:28:00] payload or audiences with the capability to be super large like morning brew or 1440 It forever maybe more niche smaller newsletters I still think it is a flat fee ad sales Is a great revenue stream and should be part of the revenue producing pie.
There are a lot Of other revenue streams and the different ways you could monetize a newsletter, a lot of them are advert related like affiliate marketing or selling leads or using ad networks and they can all kind of work together and work together, but work alongside each other to kind of diversify your revenue streams while still coming under the ad bracket and then outside of the ad bracket, there's obviously courses and kind of selling data and selling.
We'll Consulting or more specifically using your newsletter as a funnel for consulting. So yes, flat piece sponsorship is probably the most proven revenue stream for newsletters, but it's [00:29:00] definitely not the be all and end all. And some newsletters are probably better off focusing on courses or premium content.
Product and service sales. Yeah. Building a SaaS, building a SaaS product if, if that's. aligns with your newsletter and you have the skills to do so.
Dylan Redekop: So where do you see newsletter partnerships heading into 2024 in terms of, uh, maybe opportunities or changes to let people do things? I know, you know, media ad sales have kind of been sort of more or less the same model for a long time, but is there anything, is there anything you see as an opportunity in 2024?
Going forward or any new ways of monetizing that you see, see people doing that could be huge.
Dan Barry: Yeah, so ad sales or the ad market in general back in 2021 Maybe early 2022 when? The economy and the stock market was all going up into the right and marketing budgets were spent more [00:30:00] liberally selling newsletter ads or marketing campaigns on the whole.
What's a lot easier to get responses and close deals, especially when you're a new channel over the last year and a half or two as stock market has crashed, et cetera, it's become a lot harder, but the outlook for corporate marketing spend is pretty positive looking into 2024 kind of like looking across the board at different sources.
Most surveys show that most companies are planning to increase their budgets considerably and have been gradually throughout this year, step by step anyway, so I'm pretty bullish on the ad market in general, but at the same time, there are a lot more newsletters in the world, some great, some not so great, some in the middle as with anything, so it's gonna be more competition, more noise, gonna be more important to find a niche, hunker down and then own that niche or just Be really good in [00:31:00] terms of quality content.
It's gonna be really important to craft the right sales emails to stand out in people's inboxes It's gonna be really important to not just rely on one outreach method I mean, yeah, it's I could talk all day about what's going to happen in 2024 We've had sales and partnerships, but I think where possible to create a diverse revenue Pie is going to be more important and not just rely on ad sales because the last two years or so has proven that marketing budgets are very fickle that are especially experimental marketing budgets are the first thing to go in the downturn.
So if there is another downturn, global conflicts expand, whatever it is, the black, another black swan, and your only revenue is ad sales, black fee sponsorships, then, um, yeah, you're going to struggle.
Dylan Redekop: Diversification is. Is, uh, a good leverage point for diversification is like having, having more revenue streams that you can lean on if one drives up is, is never [00:32:00] a bad strategy.
I want to talk a little bit about your, your latest project revenues, which is very cleverly worded. I've got to say, I got to hand it to you. Um, so talk to us about, about launching revenues, what that newsletter is. And yeah, just give us, give us a quick background on that.
Dan Barry: So we launched revenues. In September, so it's, it's 6th of December today.
So it's still pretty fresh. It's a newsletter doing deep dives into newsletter partnerships topics, mostly focusing on how to optimize and add sales operation. Also kind of like talking more broadly about newsletter operations on the whole and affiliate marketing and maybe courses a little bit more as I build out that newsletter and then explore my own monetization routes, which.
As we discussed, maybe ad sales won't or flat fee sponsorships won't be the best route for that. So I'm exploring affiliate marketing and we'll be exploring most likely courses in the future. So that will expand my scope of newsletter monetization expertise. But yeah, the goal [00:33:00] for the newsletter is to help user operators generate more revenue and optimize their ad sales.
Um, I've not really been a writer before, so it takes me quite a while to just do the one a week on a weekend. But uh, it's fun.
Dylan Redekop: That's awesome. I, you know, you, you would have fooled me that you're not a writer because I, you know, in prep for this conversation, I did actually I'm subscribed as well. So I have, I've read a few additions too, but I went, I went and did a few more, a few more dives and I, your writing is great.
There's a lot of. Really tangible advice from somebody who very clearly has experience in newsletters and, you know, even more specifically in monetizing. And so like you, you're giving away again, that, that term, you know, tons of value, but really truly you are. So do you plan on potentially putting it behind a paywall, writing a subscription, because I do know that that's been a.
Especially with, you know, the onslaught of substack and beehive and, and these newsletter platforms that allow you to very easily, [00:34:00] you know, put a paywall up and charge a sponsorship. There's a lot of people who would probably be willing to, you know, pay for this detailed experience advice from somebody like yourself.
So is that, is that something you're thinking of?
Dan Barry: Maybe I should charge for it. Um, but currently I don't intend to charge for the, the content which I'm putting out, I intend to kind of. Keep that free, build that up as a, as a newsletter, as an audience, as a business plan on monetizing already. I'm starting to monetize it with affiliate marketing, premium content and or courses, which in this topic would be pretty similar because it's premium content educational.
Is it a course? Is it premium content? Blurry lines. That's definitely something I'm considering. Perhaps it would be kind of like more time sensitive insights on the ad market or I don't know. I'm really two or three months in to this and, and it's a good question. I'm [00:35:00] exploring all the monetization methods for the Revenews newsletter now.
Some form of premium content or courses, whether it's kind of like I've started building this out as a resource for myself and my clients anyway, like a full, enormous mind map of everything newsletter partnerships from ad ops to outreach to proposing to. Pitching, it's going to all different topics and then hopefully blending in other things alongside ad sales as well as like a full newsletter monetization blueprint, maybe something around charging for that, but at the moment I just want to keep it a free newsletter, which helps newsletter operators make more money.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, I love it. And it's a lot easier to grow a newsletter when you're your first task isn't just to subscribe, but also to, you know, chip in some money. So I'm curious. Since this is the first kind of newsletter, you project you've started on your own.
Dan Barry: Yep. And I [00:36:00] joined Finimize when they're around 500, 000 subscribers daily upside, we're now on 800, 000 and saw them continue to scale up from that.
Yeah. This is the first newsletter I've started myself and haven't really put any. Spend behind it. We've got about 500 subscribers. So it's it's super fresh Super baby. I was just tinkering around with twitter ads before our call actually, so
Dylan Redekop: Oh, nice. I was going to ask you what your, your growth strategies, at least if you, it doesn't sound like you've quite nailed down exactly what you plan to do, but if you have any, I guess from your experience with Finimize and with Daily Upside, you've seen obviously the behind the scenes of what they're doing for growth.
And are you, are you leveraging anything in particular on your end for, for growing Revenews or do you have any growth goals for 2024?
Dan Barry: Yeah, so again, I've, I've put about $50 into the growth of the newsletter, just buying a couple of ad ad slots in the newsletter. But yeah, having exposure [00:37:00] to some very competent marketers at Finimize on a daily upside, I, I, I can talk about marketing and now doing it is a different story.
I'm finding the time to actually do it as a different story, . Right. But if I were to. Assume I had the time and money to apply that knowledge to my newsletter. I would definitely focus on the higher quality channels For me anyway, because i'm fairly niche and that would be other newsletters subscribers are just going to be much more engaged twitter as a scalable channel a lot of People and people, I mean, user operators or agency owners that I know say that Twitter delivers a) low CAC and b) really engaged subscribers.
The theory being is that it's a platform with written content, not visual content like Instagram, Facebook, Facebook's a bit of both. So I'm going to lean into Twitter. I'm going to make better use of the SparkLoop platform and I'm going to continue to try and get newsletter swaps. Um, Yeah. That for me, those, [00:38:00] I think are going to be the channels I'm going to lean on the most.
Dylan Redekop: And I mean, doing that in a couple of months, getting 500 subscribers is, is, you know, that's, that's not bad at all. Uh, there's people who've been publishing newsletters for, you know, much longer that have fewer. I can vouch for that myself when I started. So anyway, Dan, it's been awesome having you on, you shared a ton of really in depth Information for us for people who are looking to get into ad sponsorships or who maybe already do the doing them, but could improve and take some of your advice.
So I'd love for you to share with us where people can find you online to follow you along, subscribe to your newsletter and so on if you want to share your where you live on the internet with us.
Dan Barry: So yeah, where, where I live. is London and where I live on the internet is Twitter, LinkedIn. My newsletter is called Revenews, the news being N E W S, like newsletter.
I thought I was very clever doing that. www. revenues. co I'd tip
Dylan Redekop: to that one though, I think, I quite like it. Cheers, [00:39:00]
Dan Barry: it took weeks, it took weeks of brainstorming. Yeah, www. revenues. co Twitter and LinkedIn, Dan Barry or Dan Barry revenues, however you stumble across me on my main platforms.
Dylan Redekop: Awesome. We'll share all that in the, uh, show notes, of course, all those links.
And again, thanks for coming on, Dan. This was a great chat. And I know our listeners will get a lot about it. So appreciate your time.
My pleasure. Thanks Dylan.
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