Do you ever think back to earlier in your business life and say, "Damn, I wish I had done things differently?"

I know I certainly do.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve looked back and wondered why I was putting ALL of my reliance on Google search traffic.

We all know what happened there.

Google crushed so many of us.

I was wrong to focus solely on one source of traffic.

I’m rectifying that this year in two different ways. Big time.

One, through my new YouTube channel, which I’ll talk about in future editions of this newsletter.

Two, through a new email newsletter I’ve created about a topic that interests me.

These past few weeks, I’ve rediscovered 3 things:

email traffic is cheap,
compounding is even more powerful than I had imagined, and
I prefer to follow a proven path rather than reinvent the wheel at each step of the way.
Let’s take a quick look at each of these in turn.

Email Traffic Is Cheap
In this blueprint, we’re told that the cost of Facebook advertising will gradually fall the longer the ad runs.

We can reduce it even further by trialing different ad creatives. Nice.

Here’s my own cost per subscriber for the first few days of my running campaign:

Day 1 => $1.21
Day 2 => $1.07
Day 3 => $0.96
Day 4 => $0.72
Day 5 => $0.63

I suspect it will stabilize close to this last figure. I do plan to tweak the creative in the coming weeks, but first, I’m prioritizing getting a batch of content ready for the newsletter. Busy, busy!

So, considering you’ve paid, say, $0.63 per subscriber, assuming there’s an 80% chance they’ll remain subscribed to your high-quality newsletter for the long term, just imagine how many pageviews that subscriber will generate over a long period. That, of course, assumes you’ve monetized those pageviews with display ads.

And the good news this week is that both Mediavine and Raptive are lowering their pageview thresholds for eligibility. That means the model can now potentially earn even faster.

The Power of Compounding
The blueprint shows us clear examples of just how much the earnings from a newsletter can compound over time.

It really is staggering. I crunched my own numbers on my personally modified version of the model, and based on the amounts I’m willing to spend for subscribers each month, my monthly display ad earnings could potentially look something like this:
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​Compounding: Potential Monthly Display Ad Earnings

Month 12: $1.6k
Month 24: $7k
Month 36: $28.5k

Very Important Disclaimer: I’m only showing these numbers to illustrate the power of compounding, but it’s important to know they’re not necessarily the numbers you’ll get. They’re from my personal projections based on what I’m planning to spend on ads, my expected cost per subscriber, the RPM for display ads, predicted drop-off rate, and click-through open rates (CTOR). Yep, a LOT of variables.

One thing I’ve learned from going through my own projections is that email newsletters are most definitely not a get-rich-quick scheme. Far from it.

I know I’ll need to stick with it for a few years before I see serious earnings. I’m OK with that. I’m especially OK with that because, unlike niche sites, Google cannot come along and destroy what I’m building before it reaches a very decent monthly income.

I Don’t Like Reinventing The Wheel
If somebody hands me a formula and says, "This is my proven model I use to make very decent money online," then I’m most likely going to take a further look.

In a former life, I was a qualified accountant. And while I hated actually being an accountant (so boring), I’ll admit that my background comes in handy when looking at numbers to evaluate if they make sense.

In the interests of full disclosure, after crunching the numbers, I did actually spot an error in Scott’s model, which I brought to his attention, and he promptly fixed it.

​The blueprint, of course, contains MUCH MUCH MORE than just numbers in a model. But numbers are important as a proof of concept.

What I really enjoyed about the blueprint is that it is very much step by step with a logical flow. As I said, I don’t like reinventing the wheel. I like to know what works and then do more of that.

I hope this helps those of you who are unsure about starting a newsletter.

Today is the last day you can get a 50% discount on the Million Dollar Newsletter Playbook.

Bye for now,
Keith

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