First sponsor for my newsletter (and thanks IH)

My newsletter le Courrier du hacker https://lecourrierduhacker.com is a weekly digest of the most important news of the French-speaking Free Software and Open Source community.

I'll publish today the #94 issue so the newsletter is almost 2 years old, with more than 2,000 subscribers, 55% open rate, 35% click rate by issue. We also publish on 2 social networks (Mastodon, Twitter) and the archives are browsable through the website, lots of people only using the rss feed to get notified about new issues.

I already told about this newsletter on the IH forum here because I could not figure how to attract sponsors and I was worried about it. Come on, after 2 years... But almost reaching the 100th issue, I had to try harder. It takes 2 hours of my time each week and I'm a freelancer, so I had to balance this cost.

So I followed what I read on the IH forum :D Thanks everyone!

I started by adding a footer at the end of my newsletter but I think it was not quite successful because I was not contacted at all for a long time. Some weeks ago, I chose to add a clear statement in the intro of the newsletter several weeks consecutively. I also add a link to the sponsor page just below the sponsor banner inside the newsletter. The current banner in the newsletter is for a job board of mine, https://www.linuxjobs.fr, and drives traffic to the job board since the start of the newsletter.

I'm not sure exactly what worked, but I was contacted some days ago by my first sponsor and after some explanation about what they could expect from this sponsoring, we agreed for a 3-week sponsoring duration. I made a 20% discount on my by-issue price of 200€. When I could not find sponsor, a IH member told me I could lower the price. It seems like a straightforward advice, but I'm not so sure about it, because I believe in the value I provide to my sponsor(s) and how it costs me to provide it.

To conclude, this newsletter is the second project I get money with, and the feeling when you get the first payment is... omg. Unlike lots of feedback I can read, my 2 projects took 2 years before getting their first payment. Being side projects both of them, It 's built really slowly, both with a community around each project. But my job board earns money on a regular basis since 2017 and growing. Let's hope it will be the same for this newsletter ;)