Can you really make money writing online?

It’s 2021, and the newsletter hype continues. People are making a lot of money writing online, but how viable is it for the average person? Let’s find out.

Subscription Newsletters

The substack powered newsletter renaissance is one of the big reasons that making money writing online has become trendy, but subscription newsletters have been around for a while. Ben Thompson of Stratechery is a classic example, making millions a year on his newsletter. The lesser known Van Trump Report, also run by a solo founder, is focused on Agriculture Technology and rakes in $30 Million a year.

Clearly there is money to be made for the people at the top, but how much room is there at the top?

A quick look at the top 10 tech newsletters on substack gives a clearer picture of the situation here. At number one, The Pomp Letter has tens of thousands of subscribers at $10/month, making around $6 Million/year. By the time we get to number five, we’ve gotten to the Exponential View, which has thousands of subscribers at $12/month, and makes around $720K/year. Finally, at number ten, we have Crypto is Easy, which has hundreds of subscribers at $12/month, and makes around $72K/year. That was a rapid drop off, and that’s just the top ten. We don’t have to go much further until people aren’t making much more than pocket change.

Substack is a limited sample, there are people writing on Ghost and other custom newsletter platforms as well, but it helps us get some rough sense that making money with a newsletter isn’t going to be that easy.

Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, a newsletter with millions of subscribers, says that this is how he would start a newsletter from scratch:

“I would pick a very small, but fast-growing niche. I would purposely know who I am trying to attract and more importantly, who I am not going try to attract. The whole point of this is you have to go niche.

I would do that, for sure. I would not sign up for Substack. I don’t think they do a good job. I think that they can do great, but I don’t think they do great at the moment.

I would then charge more money than I think I should. I would charge $500-$1,000 a year and then I would make sure that the information that I provide was very utilitarian. It would need to be, the way that I would say is, a vegetable smothered in peanut butter, in that it could be entertaining and interesting, but at its core, it’s got to be utility.

It’s got to help you get something done better. I would also try to make sure that I tailor it towards people who are going to make money using the information that I provide them. This way, it’s a very easy justification of the cost.

I would charge $500 a year and then I would spend a fair bit of money on advertising to make it grow. Then, I would occasionally have blog posts, which I would work very hard to make go viral. I would instead of posting on my own blog, post on my blog and I would try to make it go popular on Hacker News, Reddit or wherever the people are, or your site, or I would try to guest post for other people.”

Further reading:

Sponsorships

Advertising is the oldest game in the books, and sponsorships are a simpler form of advertising where you have one company paying a fairly large sum of money to be the only advertiser on your site.

Sponsorships are how a lot of creators on youtube, podcasts, and blogs make money, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon.

Marketing Examples by Harry Dry is a site that does exactly what it says on the tin. Harry writes case studies on different marketing methods that companies have successfully used, and entrepreneurs can read these and learn from them. It’s sponsored by Ahrefs, an SEO tool, and makes around $2.5K/month.

Starter Story by Pat Walls is an interview based content site. He interviews entrepreneurs of various categories and makes it easy to find stories of companies that fit some criteria, like art companies that make $5K/year. His first sponsorship back in 2018 was from Klaviyo, a marketing tool, and it made him around $1K/month.

Here’s what Harry Dry had to say about getting his first sponsorship:

“I started getting a couple of requests from companies to sponsor the site. But I didn't use any their products myself. It seemed like a bit of a waste to just promote something to my audience that I had no real love for.

But this gave me belief. So I thought who would be my dream sponsor?

And I thought of EmailOctopus. The audience matches up well. I love their product myself. And I use it to send my marketing newsletter.

So I only sent out one outreach email. And that was to their COO.(quality over quantity)! And fortunately he was interested.

I'd gotten to know him at a few London Indie Hackers meetups over the last 8 months. I think meeting in real life a few times definitely helped.

He knows that I've got a twinkle in my eye, that I'm serious and willing to put in the work. And that's something you can't really convey just on a text based email.”

Further reading:

Medium

On a totally different side of the spectrum, there is Medium, which is a platform for writers and readers. Readers can go there to discover great content. Writers can publish anything and have their content surfaced to readers who might be interested in it. Medium charges a subscription fee of $5/month to readers. Writers get paid from this subscription pool based on how much engagement their content gets. In 2020 they paid out $11 Million to writers.

As you can expect, there is a power curve distribution of earnings.

There’s no concrete data I could find, but this post gives you a sense of the difficulty of making money on Medium.

“After your first 90 days, income among my students tends to go up exponentially. $75, then $150, then $300, then up to $1,000 per month after 9 or so months of steady posting on Medium.

What would you do with an extra $12,000 per year? That’s how much you can make on Medium if you get really good.

But what about the Medium all-stars? The best of the best? Some of them make anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 per month. It’s ridiculous.”

Some advice on succeeding at Medium:

“Be prepared for the long haul, it will take one to two years before you can achieve big numbers on Medium (ex. 10,000 followers, $1000 paychecks, consistent 1000+ view articles)”

Can You Make A Lot Of Money On Medium Very Quickly?

“Sometimes you can. To be honest, though, it’s difficult to make more than $100 in your first 30 days. You’d have to get into all the top publications and publish twice per day at the very least. It’s tough. Medium is more of a “slow-burn” and rewards those who stick with it over time.”

Further reading:

Books

Books are one of the most popular ways to make money writing, but people who are trying to write online tend to think of themselves as different from book authors. Blogs are short, and books are long. Blogs are quick iterations, while a book is one big gamble.

Still, it seems that even for bloggers, publishing a book can be a good strategy to generate revenue.

Steph Smith, a popular blogger and indie maker, published Doing Content Right and made $100K in around 8 months. She had this to say when asked how she drove sales for her book:

The first step is just creating something that people love and want to talk about. Sounds incredibly obvious, but often people skip it. Okay, assuming you're already there, here are some things that I did. You can find visual examples on slide 16 onward here.

Building in the open: This is talked about a lot, so I won't go into depth, but the way I like to articulate it is "opening your garage door". Don't want until launch day to build hype around your product.

Narrow your path to feedback: This book started as a tweet where I asked people if they would pay for it. It turns out in this case, the answer was yes. Sometimes it's no! But this helps you get feedback quickly to ensure you're on the right path. And people pre-buying helps people put their money where their mouth is.

Pre-sales: Speaking of pre-sales, having customers buy in early means you have a cohort of customers supporting you when you're ready to launch.

Delayed Product Hunt launch: The same strategy was used with Product Hunt. Many people launch right when a product is ready, but if you approach it that way, you're hoping the PH launch will generate your success, instead of the other way around. In other words, if you launch immediately, you are relying on the success of a launch, instead of your audience creating the success of your launch.

Affiliates: I utilized Gumroad's affiliate program and saw a ton of sales come through there. This is dependent on you having a great product that people are excited to share.

Lowering friction to consume: One underrated thing that I don't see enough creators do is lowering the friction for someone to consume the content. Even if they buy, if they never consume though, they will never share, become an affiliate, etc. There were several things I did to encourage consumption, including structuring like a textbook, a first-page that walked you through how to use it, and having video sessions for those that didn't have time to read. I also tacked on a community and gave readers different reading formats, like MOBI for those who prefer Kindle.

Help people help you: Tied to the above, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to help you. Have shareable assets within your book, whether it's highlighted quotes or infographics. The quotes that I featured in my book were tweeted about much more widely than other parts of the book.

Tiered pricing strategy: One of the things that has been commented on the most, is my tiered pricing strategy, which meant the price went up as more people bought. This triggered scarcity and also helped me find the right price point/discounting mechanisms later.

It's important to note that I already had somewhat of an audience before launching (I believe ~7k followers?) and also spent years writing online before creating this. In other words, I had a group of people already listening.

Further reading:

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-sold-nearly-100k-of-my-ebook-in-8-months-while-growing-trends-to-millions-in-arr-ama-ef811b73b7

Community

Last but not least is the path of building a community around your writing. The only thing as hyped as newsletters might be online communities. Finding a sense of community is a fundamental human need, and when people resonate with what you’re writing, it’s likely that those people will resonate with each other.

A good recent example of this is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, the creator of Ness Labs. She writes at the intersection of entrepreneurship and neuroscience, focusing on mindful productivity, and getting things done without sacrificing your mental health

In the span of one year, she’s grown her community to $100K in ARR.

Here’s what she had to say about the first 3 things she would do to start a community from scratch right now.

Start by building an audience, which I did on Twitter and with my newsletter

Once you reach a decent number of followers/subscribers, launch a community so they can connect together (the exact number of followers/subscribers you need depends on the type of community you want to build, for example a small mastermind of 10 community members may only require a newsletter with 100-200 subscribers)

Once the community has grown to a point where you need support, hire people to help you! It doesn't have to be a huge commitment: I started with someone who joined on a freelance contract for a few hours a week, but it helped me a lot to manage all of the different moving parts of the community.

Further reading:

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-grew-an-online-community-to-100k-arr-over-one-year-ama-fab49f519b

Conclusion

Even though many of these methods follow a power curve distribution within niches, there are probably still enough niches for a surprising amount of people to make money writing online. The creator economy in general is still fairly early, and has a lot of room to grow, so there may be many more ways to monetize in the future.