Launch a 6-Fig Newsletter in 3 Hours / Day?!

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What the heck is an email newsletter and is it even a business?

Today I’ll be discussing this business model that is both red hot right now, and can be run from A to Z in just 15 hours per week.

In particular, I’ll explain how these companies work and how to spread out your time to build and manage one in just three hours per day, Mon - Fri.

Let’s dive in.

Ever since Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Workweek came out, young entrepreneurs have been fascinated by the idea of outsourcing, automation, and working as few hours as possible. Except for one small problem:

As an old business coach I used to know once said:

For better or worse, truer words have never been spoken.

Unless you worked the type of 9-5 where you gained so many of the right skills you can jump straight into entrepreneurship and launch a passive income business overnight, odds are you’re not going to be working a 4-hour workweek anytime soon.

But that doesn’t mean you “have to” grind for 50-100 hours per week just to get something off the ground. Quite the contrary in fact.

And while there are - in theory - many ways you could earn a full-time living online working just three hours per day, most of them:

1. Are not scalable

2. Can never be sold as part of an exit

3. Require you to trade dollars for hours

4. Would be dramatically hampered by you working so few hours

With Newsletters, however, it really is possible to build a biz in three hours / day. And really, I should know:

In addition to the Passionate Income newsletter, I also run an AI newsletter.

Either way, here’s a basic breakdown of the prep work required to launch a Newsletter and what tasks you would work on each day to actually build one of these in just three hours / day.

Prep Work

First, I should be clear it’s impossible to sum up how to launch and operate a literal business in one short email (LOL). With that said, you can use the below as a jumping-off point if you decide this is a path you want to pursue.

Anyways, the first thing you need to figure out is the What.

As in, what subjects / topics / industries are you interested in enough that you could commit to writing about them for the next 12+ months?

While many people will tell you to start with the Who, your target market doesn’t matter if the only reason you’re writing to them is because you think it will make you money. Mainly because, if making money is your only motivation, you’ll eventually give up when things get hard.

But if you’re legitimately interested in the topic, you’ll likely push forward.

Mainly because the topic is something you’d want to learn about regardless of whether you were building a newsletter about it.

Second, once you’ve figured out what you want to write about, you need to see if there are any others newsletters in your niche.

While many people see saturated niches / competition as a bad thing, in the newsletters space its a blessing. Why? Because it means more opportunities for cross-promotion.

For you to legitimately work 3 hours per day, you’re not going to have time to build an audience on social, create organic content or run ads. Meaning, if you want news subscribers (which are critical to growing the biz), you need to get them from other newsletters.

But if the niche you choose is so small there aren’t any other newsletters, it’s going be impossible for you to grow your business working just three hours / day.

Admittedly, there are situations where people launch these without depending on referrals from other newsletters to grow. The only caveat is, in 95% of situations they already had an existing business and/or Personal Brand they could leverage to drive new subscribers.

If you’re starting from scratch, however, growing your reader base via promos inside other people’s newsletters is a must.

Next, once you’ve figured out the What and the Who, the How, When and Where are easy.

In terms of the Where, you’ll want to get yourself setup on either Beehiiv (my preferred platform to start), ConvertKit or Substack. I like Beehiiv and ConvertKit as they easily integrate with the growth platform you’ll be using.

In terms of the When, you’ll need to decide how often you want to mail. I recommend 3x per week, as anything less means you have very few opportunities for promotion.

At the same time, the more often you mail, the more hours you’ll have to work.

Last, in terms of the How, these platforms are very easy to use.

In fact, in addition to their native tutorials, support and onboarding documents, you can find “How to…” videos for using each of these softwares on YouTube.

What matters most is identifying competing newsletters.

While many beginners are scared of competition, saturation in markets shows there are tons of people interested in XYZ topic.

As an example, while there are lots of AI newsletters, there are also hordes of people interested in AI.

So, by carving out a specific niche and tailoring our content to them, I was able to go in and start getting readers / generating revenue despite having lots of ‘competition.’

On the flip side, while starting Surfing for Single Dads newsletter could help you avoid competition, doing so would make it near impossible to grow. Mainly because there probably aren’t that many single dads who surf.

Further, newsletters aren’t exactly news. In fact, they’re red hot right now and have been for a while. So if you can’t find any competing newsletters in your niche, it’s probably because there isn’t any money to be made there.

So, embrace saturated markets.

As long as you can put a unique spin on the topic to separate your newsletter from everyone else, that’s all that matters.

Basically what I'm saying is… some businesses, like Elon Musk’s rocket company Space X, involve thousands and thousands of moving parts. Newsletters, however, only involve a small handful. And because of that, you can launch and run one in as little as three hours per day, making them highly attractive for solopreneurs, creators, and digital nomad types.

Again… you should remember this:

Once your newsletter is setup, there are three main components to the business:

1. Growth

2. Content

3. Monetization

Growth refers to constantly increasing the number of people who are subscribed to receive your content. Content refers to the actual newsletter emails you’ll be sending. And monetization refers to what you likely care about most: Actually getting some revenue and profit coming in.

Below, my Monday to Friday breakdown will cover all three.

Further, it should be noted that if you’re in a B2B niche where you can generate leads for businesses, it probably won’t make very much sense to monetize with less than 2,500 subscribers.

If you’re in a B2C niche, where sponsorship CPMs are lower and lead gen payouts aren’t as high, you can monetize as early as you want, but probably won’t see any meaningful kind of revenue come in until you reach 10,000+ subs.

But remember, unlike freelancing, you’re building an asset you can sell.

Similar to niche websites, Amazon Kindle brands, etc., most businesses that can be sold as part of an acquisition take months if not years before they generate substantial profits.

So you should look at this as something you’ll build on the side, not something that will pay you big money in the short term.

Monday / Wednesday / Friday 📆

I'd recommend doing a 3x per-week newsletter. Why?

Because if you only send one per week, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to monetize once you build a larger following. If you think of your newsletter as a digital newspaper, it’s obvious the daily paper has 6x more advertising slots than the weekly Sunday paper.

At the same time, sending a daily newsletter is difficult for a variety of reasons.

First, if your industry doesn’t lend itself to breaking news (e.g. politics, finance, tech, crypto, etc.), it’s going to be hard for you to come up with valuable content every single day.

Second, burnout is a very real problem in the newsletter space.

While many people get excited about the potential to sell their newsletter as part of an exit, that excitement quickly dies when they realize just how much work is involved.

So, I recommend sending 3x per week.

In terms of what to send, keep in mind capital “N” Newsletters are different from marketing emails.

In general, Newsletters are 100% content-focused but contain occasional promotions inside. Meaning, this is not the Internet marketing guru style email where they try to tie stories in with some kind of pitch for a product.

Instead, your newsletter should be 100% value first.

Which in most industries, means sharing breaking news, education, and most important, your unique takes on whatever industry you’re operating in.

I emphasize the part about your unique takes because you are not trying to build a news portal. There are plenty of news websites out there that are going to do a much better job than you when it comes to actually sharing the news.

Instead, what you want to do is put your unique spin on whatever is relevant to your target audience. For example, while newsletters are hot right now, nothing I'm talking about today is breaking news.

Instead, I'm sharing some education and insight for people who are interested in building a business around their passions.

Which makes sense for me and my audience given my entire brand is built around the concept of Passionate Income.

So, whether it’s humor, your unique writing style, your particular political slant, etc, don’t just parrot what’s already been said. And don’t ever copy-paste AI-generated content into your newsletter.

You can use AI to draft and brainstorm, but if you want your newsletter to succeed, you need to do something to make it stand out from the competition. And the easiest way to do that is by injecting your personality into the content itself.

Last, once you get the hang of it, it should take you no more than 2 to 2.5 hours to write each issue. Especially once you start using templates, which are critical to cutting down on how much time you spend formatting. Add another 30 minutes for inserting images and proofreading and poof…

You are now sending a 3x per week newsletter in just 3 hours per day.

*In terms of where to get the images, both Beehiiv and Substack are integrated with a stock photo side, while the monthly Canva plan gives you access to millions of stock photos for just $15 per month. Further, depending on the audience, you may also be able to use AI-generated images.

Tuesday / Friday 📆

Tuesday and Thursday will be focused on growth.

While many people who are strong writers gravitate to newsletters, the truth is growth is just as important as producing good content. Because as you likely know, it doesn’t matter how good your content is if nobody sees it.

Further, without growth, you won’t be able to monetize.

Which, unless you’re doing this as a hobby, is the entire point of building a newsletter.

While it might not sound like a lot, six hours of focused, zero-distraction work time is actually quite a bit. The caveat is that you must actually be focused and not get distracted (easier said than done).

Either way, if you have money to invest, the absolute easiest way to grow is through newsletter referral programs. The most popular being Sparkloop Upscribe, Beehiiv Recommendations, and Substack Recommendations.

The way these services work is by recommending your newsletter to other people who are already interacting with similar newsletters. In exchange for this kind of promotion, you will typically pay $1 to $3 per new subscriber.

Given you can set this up in a matter of minutes, it’s my opinion this is by far the easiest way to grow a newsletter. Especially if you’re not tech-savvy / do not have any experience running things like Facebook Ads (which can be highly complex).

In fact, this method is so passive you could do this in less than three hours/day, twice/week. In reality, it won’t take you much longer than 5-10 minutes per day.

If you don’t have money to invest, you’ll need to go the organic route.

While there are tons of options for doing this, LinkedIn and Reddit are by far the hottest options for most newsletter operators.

In particular, growing a following on LinkedIn works because it’s the only text-first platform left that offers good organic reach (in terms of organic Twitter is basically dead now).

Admittedly, I can’t deliver an entire LinkedIn Organic Marketing Course in one short email. But if you hop over to YouTube or Twitter and do some searching, there’s tons of content on how to do this.

As for Reddit, this is an underground hack very few people are talking about.

The way it works is writing long-form posts that provide 100% value, but then at the very end, letting people know you publish even more content on your newsletter.

While Reddit is known for destroying people who try to pitch their products and services in the feed, the reason this works is because it’s a value-first approach.

By offering value first (in the form of content), and then offering even more (in the form of your free newsletter), Redditors seem to be willing to overlook the fact you’re technically “promoting” something.

In terms of where to learn more about this strategy, we recommend this podcast episode.

With that said, organic growth is hard and requires serious discipline.

Because of that, to hit our goal of working just three hours per day, we highly recommend alternative strategies like newsletter swaps, guests posts, etc. versus trying to build a brand via organic content on social media.

So when are you supposed to monetize?

Given it will likely take months before you have enough subscribers, this isn’t something you’ll need to worry about (or set aside time for) in the beginning.

Further, most businesses that grow fast do so because the owner reinvests profits into growth instead of taking money out to pay himself/herself.

So, once you get a couple thousand subscribers, you should be able get some cash coming in as a result of recommending other people’s newsletters. In which case you become the referrer instead of the newsletter receiving the referral.

Next, with a couple thousand subscribers, you can start linking out to affiliate offers. At which point you can once again reinvest the profits to grow faster.

The reason I mention the above strategies is because you can setup both of them in a matter of minutes. Which, once again, aligns with our goal of working just three hours per day.

Over time, as your business grows, you’ll want to get more serious about growth and monetization however. At which point you should probably hire someone else to write the content for you.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

By following the plan above, and focusing on content Mon / Wed / Fri, and growth Tue / Thu, you will eventually find yourself in a position to monetize.

And if you’ve done things right, and built a high quality audience as a result of publishing high quality content, monetizing will be the easy part.

At which point you will probably want to work more than 15 hours per week. Why?

Because now, you have a legitimate and profitable business on your hands. One you can potentially sell, like some of the ones you see listed here.

Similar to any other business, the newsletter business is not easy. But with just three moving pieces - Content, Growth and Monetization - there’s no denying the newsletter business is simple. Commit to the long-term, provide value and you too can succeed with this business model.

I'll leave you with this quote…