The Goldpan Report

I've been trying to figure out how to balance list-building with monetization. In short, it's hard to build a paid newsletter from scratch without having an email list to promote to.
On one hand, I'm going to be advertising and using affiliate promotions as a big piece of my promotional efforts, which will generate their own sales. On the other hand, though, from personal experience I know that building an email list is a wise long-term investment, it'll give my the ability to provide sustained value in advance of a purchase, and I'll be able to better leverage public articles that I publish. In addition to that, the portion of Facebook ad traffic that doesn't convert to a sale can be recouped in the form of a free email subscriber who may convert into a paid subscriber later.
So here's my plan...
In order to provide as much value as possible to my subscribers, both free and paid, I'm going to send emails three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Both free and paid subscribers will get my Wednesday and Friday emails while only paid subscribers get Monday emails, which contain more advanced strategy breakdowns and trend analyses. Free subscribers will get a "click" campaign every Monday instead of the premium email. These will be monitored for sales conversion rate. Each of those click sequences will be its own standalone campaign. I can reuse them for advertisement traffic and other methods as well.
So now I'm working on assembling the marketing infrastructure for all of this inside ActiveCampaign. More to come soon.

I've been trying to figure out how to balance list-building with monetization. In short, it's hard to build a paid newsletter from scratch without having an email list to promote to.
On one hand, I'm going to be advertising and using affiliate promotions as a big piece of my promotional efforts, which will generate their own sales. On the other hand, though, from personal experience I know that building an email list is a wise long-term investment, it'll give my the ability to provide sustained value in advance of a purchase, and I'll be able to better leverage public articles that I publish. In addition to that, the portion of Facebook ad traffic that doesn't convert to a sale can be recouped in the form of a free email subscriber who may convert into a paid subscriber later.
So here's my plan...
In order to provide as much value as possible to my subscribers, both free and paid, I'm going to send emails three times a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Both free and paid subscribers will get my Wednesday and Friday emails while only paid subscribers get Monday emails, which contain more advanced strategy breakdowns and trend analyses. Free subscribers will get a "click" campaign every Monday instead of the premium email. These will be monitored for sales conversion rate. Each of those click sequences will be its own standalone campaign. I can reuse them for advertisement traffic and other methods as well.
So now I'm working on assembling the marketing infrastructure for all of this inside ActiveCampaign. More to come soon.

I'm 100% anal retentive about my websites, but I'm also always trying to save time. That means I end up reviewing EVERY SINGLE type of plugin and platform out there before I make the website go live.

I reviewed all kinds of membership platforms, including BuddyBoss, Memberful, SubStack, Ghost, and several WordPress plugins. I ended up using WPFusion's premium WordPress plugin to manage logins and ActiveCampaign for my CRM which will manage tags and communication. Each time someone registers as a Goldpan Report member, their information will be sent to my CRM and, each time they log into the site, WPFusion will pull their information from the CRM. Simple enough in principle.

Although it's a more complex setup, it gives me the ability to customize the CSS and layout of the membership pages. Goldpan Report is minimalist by design, and I didn't want the bloated features of some of the other platforms. This way, the interface will be simple and clean. Something you'd feel good logging into.

The marketing world moves very quickly. I wrote my book to help business leaders maintain their strength amidst the storm of marketing innovation, but I also knew that ongoing support was needed. Trends change really quickly in B2B marketing, and businesses don't have a resource beyond blog posts (which have their own level of bias) to determine whether a new trend is worth their time.
I ran a marketing agency for eight years. I don't want to get back to that business model. It burned me out and is not scalable at ALL. Sure, there are agencies that HAVE scaled, but it's not a business model that has growth inherent in its structure.
After I finished writing my book, I started thinking about how I could continue producing the kind of content that I enjoyed writing about, but in a more ongoing fashion (and without continually writing and launching books). A paid newsletter arose as my favorite option for writing and publishing about legitimate marketing trends that businesses can rely on without getting overwhelmed or falling into shiny object thinking. That's how the Goldpan Report was born.