How to Create a Paid Newsletter: The Complete Guide

Interested in creating a paid newsletter but not sure how to get started?

Paid newsletters have absolutely exploded in popularity over the past few years, with some newsletters even being valued at tens of millions of dollars. For example, in 2020, Morning Brew was acquired in a deal worth around $75 million.

While the average paid newsletter might not quite reach those heights, the key point here is that there’s a lot of opportunity in the newsletter space – opportunity that you can take advantage of.

Beyond the potential to build a direct relationship with your own audience (outside of the control of search engines and social media), a newsletter can also help you achieve the pinnacle of digital monetization strategies – automatic recurring revenue.

So – how can you create your own paid newsletter and achieve these benefits? In this post, you’re going to learn every step of the process, including both the technical parts of creating a newsletter as well as more conceptual information such as how to choose a niche and price your newsletter.

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Before we get into the more actionable tips for how to create a paid newsletter, let’s start with a quick overview of the steps that we’ll cover in this tutorial:

Choose your newsletter niche – to achieve success, you’ll want to focus your newsletter on a specific area.
Select your newsletter platform – there are multiple ways to create a newsletter, so you’ll want to choose the best platform for your business.
Set up the technical aspects of your newsletter – once you’ve chosen your platform, you’ll need to actually set up your newsletter platform.
Create your newsletter content – after you’ve set up your platform, you can start creating newsletter content.
Price your newsletter – to maximize your revenue, you’ll want to properly price your newsletter content.
Promote your newsletter to grow your audience – once you have everything set up, you’ll need to promote your newsletter to start growing your audience.

Let’s go through each step in detail…

Before you do any work on setting up your newsletter, you first want to think about and plan your newsletter’s niche.

Here are a few examples of newsletters that have clearly defined niches:

Going (formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights) – this newsletter shares cheap flight deals with travelers who are looking to spend less money on airfare.
Stratechery – this newsletter focuses on business and strategy, with a special emphasis on how technology affects those areas.
Daily Coding Problem – as the name suggests, this newsletter sends one coding problem every day. Users can then upgrade to also receive an additional newsletter with the solution and related tips (free users do not get the solutions).
The Daily Upside – this newsletter focuses on sending engaging business stories every day.

If you want to see even more examples, we have a whole post with 24+ email newsletter examples.

Research Your Niche

Before finalizing your niche choice, you should research your niche in detail so that you better understand its potential.

Here are some basic questions you’ll want to answer before proceeding:

How large is my potential audience?
Who are my main competitors?
Are there any gaps in my niche? That is, areas that competitors aren’t covering or aren’t covering well.
What is the monetization potential in my niche? Are people willing to pay for the type of content that I will offer?
Is my niche seasonal? For example, if you create a newsletter about skiing, you probably won’t get as much interest in the summer months.

Develop an Audience Persona

If you want your newsletter to be successful, you need to know exactly who you’re creating content for.

One of the best ways to achieve this is by developing an audience persona. Your audience persona is more than just a general descriptor – e.g. “people interested in WordPress”.

Instead, it’s a specific person (or group of people) who represents the type of person you’re targeting with your newsletter.

For example, “Sally, a 35-year-old professional who is looking to build a successful business offering WordPress services to her clients”.

For a deeper look, check out our full guide on how to develop customer personas.

Once you have a niche and an audience persona in your mind, you can come up with a name for your newsletter.

You want your name to be something that will resonate with your target audience. It’s totally fine to use insider terminology/slang as long as the insider words are things that your target audience will automatically understand.

In fact, that can actually be a good thing, because it will showcase expertise and reiterate your newsletter’s niche.

For example, there used to be a basketball strategy newsletter named “Cleaning the Glass”. While that name probably doesn’t mean anything to non-basketball fans, people who are interested in basketball strategy will instantly recognize the meaning.

On the other hand, if you’re focused on a more general niche – e.g. interesting news stories – you would probably want to choose a more general name.

Either way, you’ll want to keep your newsletter’s name short and to the point – most newsletters use just two or three words.

To help you come up with a name, you can check out our full guide to naming your newsletter, which also includes 21+ examples to inspire you.

Once you’ve nailed down the niche for your newsletter, the next step is to choose the home for your newsletter.

There are several platforms that you can use to create a newsletter, each with their own pros and cons.

In the past, most people created and managed newsletters using email marketing software like Mailchimp. You would create your newsletter content using the tool’s builder and send it out directly to subscribers’ inboxes.

For the most part, your newsletter content wouldn’t exist anywhere on the web – it would just be in users’ inboxes.

Nowadays, most of the popular paid newsletter platforms approach things a bit differently. Rather than only sending content to users’ inboxes, these tools use a sort of hybrid approach where your content is both published on the website (similar to a blog) and sent to users’ inboxes.

This approach is better for several reasons:

Peer-to-peer growth and marketing – users can share your public newsletter content with their friends and on social media, which can help you grow your subscribers more effectively.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – if you have a free tier, you can rank your newsletter content in search engines to connect with people who are interested in your content.
More options for users – users can choose whether they prefer to read in their email inboxes or on the web.
User discussion – by also publishing a web-based version of your newsletter, your subscribers can comment and engage with you (and other subscribers) in a discussion area.

Within the newer approach to paid newsletters, there are several popular options, with the most notable ones being the following:

WordPress.com Newsletter
Substack
Beehiiv
Ghost

While all of these platforms have their own pros and cons, we naturally believe that the WordPress.com Newsletter option is the best all-around choice for most people.

Here are some reasons to consider WordPress.com Newsletter:

WordPress.com Newsletter lets you have unlimited subscribers on all of its plans – even the free one! In contrast, a lot of other services will charge you money once you pass a certain number of subscribers.
WordPress.com lets you choose your pricing model. You can use the free plan and pay 10% of any premium subscriptions that you generate (identical to Substack’s model). Or, you can pay $45 per month for the Commerce plan to enjoy 0% transaction fees. There are also options in the middle, where you pay a smaller monthly fee but still some transaction fees – e.g. a flat $25 per month plus 2% transaction fees. Basically, you can choose the model that makes the most sense for your newsletter, whereas most other newsletter services force you to use a single model.
All the features your newsletter needs. WordPress.com Newsletter has built-in access to all the features you need to create, manage, and grow your newsletter.
The flexibility of WordPress. If you use the WordPress.com Business plan or Commerce plan, that means you’re free to install your own custom WordPress plugins to add even more functionality if needed.

Once you’ve chosen the best paid newsletter platform for your situation, you’ll want to dive in and set things up.

For this guide, we’re going to use the WordPress.com Newsletter tool as an example. It’s totally free to get started, so you can set everything up without ever needing to crack open your wallet.

To get started, go to the WordPress.com Newsletter page and click one of the Start my newsletter buttons.

This will launch you into the Newsletter setup flow, which will help you set up all the basics for your Newsletter.

>> First, you’ll enter the site icon, name, and description for your newsletter. Don’t worry – you’ll be able to change all of these details later on if needed. For example, if you don’t have a site icon yet, you can always skip it for now and add it later on.

>> Next, choose whether you want to create a free newsletter or a paid newsletter. If you’re migrating from another newsletter platform, you can also import your existing subscribers.

Even if you start with a free newsletter, you’ll still be able to add a paid newsletter option later.

>> You then have an option to add a custom domain name for your newsletter or use a free subdomain from WordPress.com or news.blog.

If you’re not sure about your domain name yet, you can choose the Decide later option to pick later on.

>> Finally, you’ll see a list of plans that you can use. You can get started with the Free plan and upgrade later on if you decide you’d like to use a paid plan.

Now, WordPress.com will create your newsletter for you.

Create a Payment Plan

Once you’ve set up your basic newsletter site, the next step is to create a payment plan. This plan will control pricing and access to your paid newsletter content.

First, you’ll want to set up a payment method:

Open your WP Admin.
Go to Tools → Earn.
Click the Enable Premium Content button.

You’ll then be prompted to connect to Stripe, which will handle processing your newsletter’s payments.

Then, you’ll be asked to create a free Stripe account (or log in to your existing Stripe account).

Once you’ve connected your newsletter to Stripe, you can go to Tools → Earn → Settings.
Then, select the Payment plans option and choose Add a new payment plan.

When setting up the payment plan, make sure to enable the Paid newsletter subscription toggle. We’ll talk a lot more about pricing later on, but $5 per month is a good starting point for most newsletters.

Start Sending Newsletters

With that, you can already start sending newsletters.

Go to Posts → Add New.

Add your content using the editor and control who will receive that post using the Access options.

If you don’t have any paid subscribers yet, you won’t be able to choose the Paid subscribers only option.

If a user who isn’t a subscriber tries to read the post on your website, they’ll be prompted to subscribe.

Once you have a functioning newsletter platform, you’ll need to start filling it with content.

Of course, you’ll also want some readers to send that content to – don’t worry, we’re going to cover that in a later section.

So – how about the actual newsletter content itself?

If you want a detailed guide here, we have a whole post on how to write a newsletter. But here are the highlights:

Choose an angle for every article – you want to bring a unique point of view to each article, whether that’s being a contrarian, adding a new framework, sharing your unique experiences, and so on. This is why people subscribe to you.
Write to your audience persona – don’t feel like you need to write to a general audience. Instead, connect directly with the audience persona(s) that you created.
Use an outline – instead of just dumping words on a page, try creating an outline before you start writing.
Focus on the subject line/title – writing a great subject line is what hooks your readers and gets them to keep reading.
Test/review everything – make sure that you test and review your newsletter before sending it. Check for grammar issues, broken links, mobile responsive issues, and so on.

When you use WordPress.com Newsletter, you can add your newsletter content using the regular WordPress editor.

If you’re already familiar with WordPress, you’ll feel right at home.

Even if this is your first time using WordPress, the editor’s simple block-based approach is easy to pick up. For the most part, you can just click and type.

To create a new article, go to Posts → Add New in your WP Admin. Then, add your content using the editor.

When you’re ready to publish your article, you can use the Access option to choose who to send the email to (as well as who can view that article on your site).

You have three options:

Everyone – this will send an email to every subscriber. On your website, every single visitor will be able to see the article – even anonymous visitors.
Anyone subscribed – This will send an email to every subscriber. On your website, users will need to subscribe to read the content (even if that’s just subscribing to the free plan).
Paid subscribers only – this will only send an email to paying subscribers. On your website, only paying subscribers will be able to see the article.

Since this is a guide on how to create a paid newsletter, it wouldn’t be complete without a discussion on how to optimally price your newsletter.

We already discussed setting up your payment plan in the section above on how to set up your newsletter platform. However, what we didn’t discuss is the actual pricing strategy itself.

When talking about optimal paid newsletter pricing, there are two high-level variables to consider:

Using a freemium model (offering both free and paid content) versus using an exclusively premium model.
How much to charge for your premium newsletter content, along with the billing frequency.

Nowadays, most popular newsletters use the freemium approach, rather than exclusively offering premium content.

This freemium approach isn’t just for newsletters, either. It’s also very popular with podcasters, software products (including WordPress plugins), and many other industries.

The main advantage of offering free content is that it helps you build your audience. People can find your free content in search engines, on social media, and so on. Then, you can convert them into paying customers later on once you’ve already sold them with the quality of your free content.

The one exception to this model might be if you already have a very large audience on a different platform. For example, if you already have a huge following on YouTube or a traditional blog, you might use that as your “free” content and then exclusively offer premium content through the newsletter.

But unless that fits your situation, you will probably want to use the freemium approach to grow your own audience. It’s very hard to grow a premium-only newsletter from scratch if you don’t already have access to an existing audience.

Price and Billing Duration

Even if you use the freemium approach, you will still have premium content. So the next questions you need to answer are:

How much to charge for that content.
How often to charge the aforementioned subscription fee.

Let’s talk about the duration first…

Billing Duration

Most popular newsletters use a monthly billing approach, which is a great place to start when it comes to frequency.

If you use WordPress.com Newsletter, you have the freedom to choose other billing durations. But in general, monthly probably makes the most sense because it’s what most of your subscribers will be familiar with.

Offering an annual subscription can have advantages in that it locks in your revenue upfront and reduces the risk of month-to-month unsubscribes (called “churn”). However, the downside is that you’re asking for a much larger payment upfront, which might lower the number of people who subscribe.

As a nice middle ground, you can always offer both monthly and annual options and let people choose their preferred duration. A common approach here is to give people two months free if they pay annually.

So, if you charge someone $5 per month, your annual price might be just $50 instead of $60.

Price

Speaking of the price itself, most paid newsletters start at around $5 per month at a minimum, though you might see a few newsletters priced below that.

The “average” newsletter then tops out at around $15 per month. However, there’s no hard rule saying you can’t charge more than that.

In general, you should try to price your newsletter based on the value of what it helps others achieve, rather than based on length, frequency, or similar metrics.

For example, a newsletter about “fun news stories” might be priced on the cheaper end because it’s primarily for entertainment. While entertainment has value, there are lots of different ways that readers can entertain themselves, so they might not be willing to pay a lot for your newsletter.

On the other hand, a newsletter about “investment opportunities in the renewable energy space” might be priced much higher because readers could be relying on your newsletter to make serious business decisions.

At this point, you have a fully functioning newsletter. But what you might not have yet is readers.

If you don’t already have an existing audience that you can promote your newsletter to, it can be a struggle to start finding subscribers.

But once you get the ball rolling, your newsletter will pick up inertia and start to grow more rapidly.

So – how can you start generating those initial subscribers and growing your newsletter over time?

Here are a few tips and strategies to grow your newsletter:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Social media
Direct user sharing
Conversion optimization

Rank Your Free Content in Search Engines

As we mentioned earlier, one advantage of offering some publicly available free newsletter content is that you can rank your free content in Google and other search engines.

People who are searching for that content might find your free content and then become regular subscribers.

Beyond ranking the individual posts themselves, you can also optimize your homepage to rank for keywords related to your newsletter niche.

For example, if you have a newsletter about business news in Brazil, you would want to optimize your newsletter homepage for keywords like “Brazil business news”.

To boost the visibility of your free newsletter content, make sure to share it on your social media profiles, along with all the relevant hashtags.

You can also share in Facebook groups or other social communities where you think the content might be relevant (as long as you’re following the community’s rules).

Beyond doing your own sharing, you should also look for ways to encourage other people to share your content on social media.

For example, the Brain Food newsletter includes a “Tiny Thought” in each newsletter, along with a link to let people easily share that thought on their own Twitter profiles:

Use Content Marketing

Publishing some free newsletter content is already a form of content marketing, as your free content is essentially a marketing tool to help you grow your subscribers and find paying customers.

However, you can also use other types of content to grow your newsletter.

For one approach, you could experiment with posting videos on YouTube, as it offers a different way to connect with users. You could then try to convert your YouTube watchers into newsletter subscribers.

For example, Morning Brew is best known as a daily email newsletter. But in addition to that, Morning Brew also launched a Morning Brew YouTube channel where they post shorts and some longer-form videos.

Another strategy could be to post unique content on social media in addition to sharing your free articles. For example, you could experiment with Twitter threads or long-form LinkedIn posts.

Simple word of mouth is another great way to grow your newsletter. If a user shares your content with their friends, those friends might become subscribers as well. Over time, you can naturally grow your newsletter via word of mouth.

To encourage this process, you can ask users to share your newsletters with their friends. Some newsletters even add social share options and “Forward to a Friend” links.

To account for forwarded emails, you can also include an option to subscribe in your email.

Here’s an example of both from the wpMail.me newsletter:

Screenshot of forward to a friend option

All of the tips above will help you get visitors to your newsletter website. However, getting them to your website isn’t enough – you also need to get them to actually subscribe.

To turn as many visitors as possible into newsletter subscribers, you’ll want to focus on conversion rate optimization.

Your newsletter’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who subscribe. Optimizing this rate involves finding ways to increase that percentage.

Here are a few tips to help increase your newsletter conversion rate:

Display your newsletter signup form prominently – you want it to be impossible for readers to miss the form. If you use the WordPress.com Newsletter theme, it will automatically display your subscribe form in optimal positions. If you’re on a different theme, or if you’d like to manually add a subscribe form in specific locations, you can always add the Subscribe Block or a Newsletter Pattern to your site wherever you’d like to prominently display your subscribe form.
Consider prompting your readers to subscribe with a subscribe popup as they scroll through your posts. On WordPress.com you can enable this by going to Settings → Newsletter and turning on ‘Enable subscriber pop-up.’ You can also edit the content of the popup.
Use call to actions (CTAs) to encourage people to subscribe. E.g. “Subscribe today – it’s free!” is a common CTA to get people to subscribe to your free tier.
Experiment with different placements and CTA messages to find what works best.

In addition to growing your free newsletter, you can use similar strategies to grow your paid newsletter subscribers.

For example, the Brain Food newsletter adds a CTA at the end of every email to encourage users to upgrade to the paid version.

That wraps up our guide on how to create a paid newsletter, starting from the idea phase and going all the way through making, growing, and pricing your newsletter.

For the easiest way to get started with your own paid newsletter, you can use the WordPress.com Newsletter service.
Sign up for free today and you can launch your first newsletter in no time.

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