Help please. Paid newsletter?
Hello from South Africa.
I am planning on starting a paid newsletter/blog and I am unsure about which products to use. The newsletter/blog will provide free content as well as exclusive content for paid subscribers. I would like to keep costs low and I also do not know much about coding.
PayPal operates in South Africa however Stripe does not so I cannot use SubStack or Revue. Medium does not seem ideal. What do do you guys recommend?
I would greatly appreciate it if you would advise me.
How about a self-hosted WordPress site plus EmailOctopus or Convertkit? You can link Paypal with Woocommerce to manage payments.
Might take a bit more technical setup from your end at the beginning , but it should be smooth sailing afterwards.
Hi, Thanks so much for the advice. That's really kind of you. Why did you recommend Wordpress and not Ghost?
I like Ghost a lot for this! It's a really solid CMS and the membership stuff augments an already great platform, instead of being the primary focus. I wrote a big guide on how to build a paid membership blog using Ghost on my site: https://www.mailinglisthackers.com/creating-a-member-supported-blog-using-ghost-and-stripe/
Oops, I see that you can't use Stripe! You may be able to make something work using Zapier or another automation tool, e.g. when someone subscribes using PayPal, add them as a member in Ghost. Haven't tried that before but seems like it could be worth exploring and then writing a blog post about!
Thank you so much for taking the time to help. Much appreciated.
I believe ConvertKit is about to launch this feature in the coming months.
Thank you for taking the time to help.
https://substack.com/ also comes to mind.
Pros:
Cons:
You can use custom domains with https://distinguish.ink (disclaimer: I made this).
Very cool. Are you nervous that your business will be demolished when they offer this as a feature? I don’t think they will right away because they want everyone to know who they are for now but at some point I suspect they’ll offer this.
Your site looks great as things currently stand.
Yes, I assume that will happen at some point and that's fine. This is just a small side project for me that I hope will bring in a little bit of money (when I have time to put a bit more effort into finishing and marketing it).
I love that you’re executing. Regardless, you are learning and doing something which is far more than a lot of people can say. I’ll use your service if/when I spin up my first newsletter on substack. Pricing seems fine to me too.
My apologies. I missed that.
Hi. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. However as mentioned in my post, I am unable to use SubStack