7 simple methods to monetize your email list

Ascend 101

Lessons about building a one-person business, writing, and self-improvement


Somehow, someway, it seemed the last email I scheduled got messed up.

Because of my lack of oversight, I’ll delay the rising price of my Clarity Call by 24 hours. The price will go from $149 to $199 Monday at 6 pm EDT.

But on to today’s email. The proper one this time:

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The great thing about owning an email list is the absolute freedom you have. It’s yours and nobody is taking it from you. You can never lose it.

The added benefit of having absolute freedom is also having plenty of opportunities to monetize it. No one is going to tell you what you can & can’t do.

All kinds of people have all kinds of problems all the time. And you can get really creative about how you want to solve them. And as you know, solving problems translates to money.

There are far more possibilities than I’m able to cover. But I’ll cover the 7 most practical and useful methods.

7 ways to make money with your email list

Method 1) Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest to start with.

You don’t need anything. You don’t have to go through the troubles of making a product or helping people out with a service of yours.

All you do is take a product or service of someone else and advertise it to your audience.

Then whenever you make a sale you’ll get a cut of the profits. Depending on who you’re working with this might be anything from 20% to 50%.

This won’t make you rich by any stretch of the imagination. In order to make a lot of money doing this you’ll need a tremendous audience. But affiliate marketing shines in the ability to start practicing your copy immediately.

You can get experience trying to sell stuff without having to spend the time to create anything yourself.

Definitely recommended to people early on in their journey.

Method 2) Promote your services

If you want to go to the next level after affiliate marketing, I’d suggest that you offer and promote your services.

Whether that’s freelancing, consulting, coaching, or something else entirely.

These services will be high-ticket, giving you a lot more cash in your pocket to invest in your education and raise your money-making capabilities.

Next to simply earning you a decent income, you’ll also start gaining more experience by working with clients hands-on. You’ll see where your strength lies and what you still have to work on.

You’ll discover the methods & frameworks that work as well as those that need some fine-tuning depending on the feedback you get from your clients.

Through this process, you’ll also build up some authority which will help you land more clients and continue to grow even faster.

Method 3) Promote digital products

Once you’ve gained enough experience offering your service, you can start selling products.

These products are your methods, systems, or frameworks that you were using/teaching in your service, but packaged nicely in a digital product.

The reason I recommend first starting with a high-ticket service before selling a product is that you have no idea whether the product actually works for other people as well.

You also don’t have any social proof to back up your claims.

Because of this it’s better to first gain experience, social proof, and results/case studies before wasting time building something that nobody actually needs.

Method 4) Promote physical goods

You don’t have to be limited to just selling digital products. You can sell physical products as well.

There are many people who use their email lists to sell various products from their Shopify store.

While physical products come with the added obstacles of production and storage, they are and will remain a viable option.

Method 5) Paid Ads/sponsorships

If you’ve got a large audience, then that means you’re getting a lot of eyes on your content.

And as you know, in today’s day and age, attention is the new currency.

One of the ways you could make use of this is by getting sponsorships and basically giving “shout-outs” to different businesses, products, newsletters, services, people, you name it.

There are services that provide easy matching with sponsors or you can talk to different people who would be interested to get sponsored in your newsletter.

Method 6) Boosts/recommending other newsletters

Beehiiv has this amazing feature called Boosts.

It allows you to opt-in to a network of hundreds of newsletters that are paying you to recommend their newsletter.

And it couldn’t be easier to set up. All you have to do is select the newsletters you like and that’s it.

Now whenever someone subscribes to your newsletter they’ll get a pop-up asking them whether they’d be interested to subscribe in your recommendations as well.

Whenever someone does subscribe to one of your recommendations, you get paid a fixed amount. It’s as easy as that.

There are other services as well that offer a similar process, but Boosts by Beehiiv is by far the easiest one to set up.

Method 7) Paid newsletter

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to include this method.

Having a paid newsletter is definitely viable. But it’s difficult to build enough authority, hype, and trust with your audience to pull this off.

It’s basically a subscription to a community, except you only ever hear from 1 person.

Building and maintaining communities is already difficult enough. Imagine how challenging building and maintaining a paid newsletter is.

I wouldn’t recommend you do this until you’re absolutely sure you’ve got enough traffic and authority in your space to make it last.


PS:

Don’t forget to book your Clarity Call with me. The price will increase to $199 tomorrow at 6 pm EDT.

I’ve already 3 calls scheduled on my calendar for next week. And I can only fit in so many calls.

More people will book a call. I can promise you that.

If you want to get in soon and enjoy the lower investment of $149. Then I’d highly suggest you don’t procrastinate on this decision and book your call now.


And if you've got a moment, I'd love to hear what you thought of this edition of Ascend 101.

Send me a quick message – I reply to every email!