Money Talk

It's been seven months since Money Talk made its debut and the newsletter has gone from strength to strength. But with work commitments, it's been hard to promote it.

One thing I've been pondering over the last several months is using a website to amalgamate all the information - it's better for search and easier to promote and there's also the possibility of additional revenue streams. So, I give you the new Money Talk: heymoneytalk.co.uk

It's coming up to two months of Money Talk's official launch and, I think at least, it's in a pretty good spot in terms of content.

So, I decided to hit the launch button on Product Hunt. If you're on there please give Money Talk an up vote!

Meanwhile, I also wanted to share this video I watched as part of Y Combinator's Startup School:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xU050kMbHM

It's been a slow slog but the subscriber number has hit the 100 mark! Again!

Let me explain: I launched Money Talk straight into paid, which meant there was zero content for free subscribers to see and interact with. I sent the first post to a curated list of over 200 people. Some became paid subscribers right away and some unsubscribed, which is fair - it's not for them. I also manually unsubscribed most of them so just 80 people remained. (I wrote about the reasoning here.)

I've been consistently putting out weekly newsletters for paid subscribers since, with a teaser for non-subscribers. Not much of one though. There's been a steady trickle of new subscribers and unsubscribers - never dipping below 80. But there was also a period of perhaps two weeks when nothing happened, which is obviously worrying when you're starting something new.

However, things really picked up in the last two weeks. I made a couple of changes around how I promoted Money Talk in that time so now it's just a case of crunching numbers to see what worked.

This month has gone incredibly quickly.

Every weekend I've been tweaking and improving the newsletter content to add value. And during the week, alongside freelancing, I'm also working out how I can market it better.

One of the biggest challenges for me has been getting the word out there when people can't see the product for themselves as it's behind a paywall. I'm writing a medium post on what that means and will share it soon.

One of the things I'm trying this week is offering a free trial to new subscribers.

Off the back of that, I've also paused payments from paying subscribers, which unfortunately means there's currently a dip in my income. But I think it's the fair thing to do for existing readers.

Meanwhile, I did a little interview around what goes on behind the scenes and you can read it here.

I created social media profiles for Money Talk soon after the launch (scroll down to read more) - it seemed like the obvious next step - but the idea of Facebook groups didn't even enter my mind.

Today I changed that. Because while doing some research for other work, I realised how valuable Facebook groups can be for growing a business - it's an easy way for more people to discover you on their own and to establish a community.

My next step? Find out how to actually grow this community.

What comes after the podcast? The e-book of course!

Between writing newsletters for subscribers and joining every networking and learning experience I could, I was writing the Money Talk e-book. It's now on Amazon and I'm waiting for it to be made available on Google Play.

Actually, the content is quite different from what's covered in the newsletter, mainly because the newsletter is timely while the e-book is supposed to be evergreen.

I decided to sell it rather than offer it as a freebie for promotion purposes because actually, I think there are some pretty good resources in there. Like the newsletter, I really took time over it and I think it's worth paying for.

That said, once it's available on Google Play as well, I'm going to work out a way to get it to my paid subscribers for free as a value-added product.

Because I launched straight into a paid model, I needed to come up with a strategy to reach my free subscribers too. This, I thought, could be value added for my paying subscribers too.

The result was MT Alert, an ad hoc and actionable newsletter. In this case, it was on interest rates falling at a big savings firm.

I wrote in a previous milestone about how I had originally added 200 contacts to my launch email. Well, before the first official newsletter went out, I whittled this down to about 80.

I went through the entire subscriber list to see who had opened the emails and how many times. I then removed anyone who hadn't opened the first email at all or had only opened it once and didn't get in touch with me. That, I decided, was a sign that they're not really interested in my project. I wanted to be respectable of their time and their inboxes. Substack, by the way, has an unsubscribe option so people can opt out any time.

The result? I had a 64% open rate, which I think is pretty good. And a couple of weeks later, one person subscribed after reading it.

About a week before I launched the newsletter, I actually attended a free webinar on how to successfully launch a podcast and get your first 1,000 listeners.

I used to have a podcast. One of the reasons I gave it up was that I was paying for the hosting but I wasn't making money from it. You had to sign up to Patreon separately to get your fans to pay for what was essentially free content. At first it was a nice extra for the blog I was writing. But after I got a full-time job, I just didn't have time to do the interviews and editing.

One of the things I wanted to find out from this webinar was where I could host podcasts for free. The webinar turned out to be a bit of a marketing exercise. The person was trying to plug their podcasting course and getting people to sign up before the webinar ended - something I'm seeing on Facebook a lot right now. I didn't find the answer to the one question I had.

But I did walkaway with some takeaways. First, one of the most successful ways to monetise your podcast is to plug your own product - exactly what the host was doing. And second, it's a way to amplify your brand to a new audience.

I didn't have a product to sell though, so it felt like a dud.

But after I launched the newsletter, I started looking into how I could pull in audience from other places. That's when the podcast webinar popped into my head. And by pure serendipity, I found a site that hosts podcasts for free.

This is the result.

Like the newsletter, it is by no means a completed project. Right now it's just an excerpt of the main product but I'm hoping that in about six months' time, I'll have time to do something a bit more substantial with it when my current work contract ends.

After my first newsletter went out, I got some feedback straight away. It was my former boss and colleague - who also kindly subscribed.

I'm really glad this came in, because it's hard to see your flaws when you're in the middle of it. And she was extremely helpful and constructive.

Because of her nudges, I made a logo straight away - I had originally planned to do it in a couple of weeks but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like I needed brand status from the start.

I honestly thought I might have had a bit more time to work on the project before having to deliver the first product. But because I already had some paying subscribers, the pressure was on to deliver the goods.

So, I give you my first official newsletter to paying subscribers.

I had a rough idea of the things I wanted to cover but it's definitely a first go at things. The exact format, and style, is something I want to refine over the coming weeks. My biggest worry is whether people will mass unsubscribe after the first month - so I'm working over hard on delivering great content.

BTW, the headline you see in the preview below is new. When I originally sent it out, I had only MT Week and the date (as you can see from the URL) because I wanted to keep even the contents under wraps. But then I thought, I could use the actual headline as the teaser (and maybe SEO value) rather than upping the free content. What do you think?