10 Newsletter Business Ideas You Can Start This Weekend

DEEP DIVE

Here are 10 newsletter ideas you can start this weekend, grow, and monetize fast:

1) Marketing Newsletter For Global Talent

One of the biggest shifts in the past few years has been the rise in overseas talent. This isn’t going anywhere.

For example, job boards like onlinejobs.ph and overseas recruiting agencies like somewhere.com have grown to 8 figures in revenue.

As a marketer and business owner, I noticed most overseas marketers typically aren’t as skilled as Western marketers. 

It has nothing to do with the language barrier. Overseas marketers have great English.

It has to do with something out of their control: budgets.

New marketers in the USA work with $100K/mo+ budgets right out of school. Marketers in the Philippines, India, and South America typically work with less than 5% of that.

That creates a skill gap. And a lucrative opportunity for you. 

Here’s the pitch:

Create a newsletter specifically for overseas marketers seeking remote USA-based marketing jobs.

Subscriber Acquisition Strategy 

• In places like India, the Philippines, and South America, you can get newsletter subscribers for $0.25-$0.50 or less from Facebook ads.

• $5k/mo ad budget = 20,000 new subscribers every month.

Newsletter Structure

You'll have 3 sections per newsletter

• Section 1: Great remote marketing jobs readers can apply to

• Section 2:  Relevant digital marketing news and updates

• Section 3:  Actionable digital marketing tutorial or tactic

Monetization Strategy: 

These subscribers are easy to get and will find your content valuable.

BUT they’re not the audience you want to monetize.

If you want to make this a real business, you need to monetize the Western audience who wants to hire talented marketers overseas for less than US-based hires.

Here are 4 ways you’ll make money:

1. Job board – Make a free job board where companies can post marketing jobs for overseas talent. Once you have a decent number of jobs listed,  you can charge companies $300-$500 for a "boost" where you feature the job in your newsletter which reaches 20k+ talented marketers.

2. If you collect subscriber data at sign-up (work experience, job title, level, company, skills, etc.), you can send targeted, sponsored email blasts on behalf of job advertisers. Charging anywhere from $1K - $3K for a “recruiting email blast” to help companies generate more qualified candidates.

3. Partner with or create your own overseas recruiting agency 

4. Create a digital marketing course and sell it to the international audience of marketers.

Here’s how the math works out:

• Assume a $0.25 CPA

• $5K/month budget = 20K new subs/month

• $300/job posting x 5 jobs per newsletter= $1.5K per issue

• 3 newsletters sent per week x 4 weeks = $18K/month revenue

• 5 “recruiting email blasts” per month x $2K each = $10K/month revenue

Total revenue = $28,000 per month with an audience of 20,000-40,000 international marketers.

2) Platform-based newsletter

Miss Excel built an 8-figure business creating courses and content on how to use Excel more effectively. 

How can you replicate this? 

Create a list of the tools, platforms, and programs that are commonly used in your industry or you personally love. 

Then, determine if there’s room to build an educational newsletter instructing people on how to use them better.

You can build a sizeable, valuable audience of professionals for a platform-based newsletter. 

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Logic or Ableton for music production

• DaVinci for video editing

• Notion for operations

• Canva for graphics

• Figma for design  

• Klaviyo for e-commerce

• Perplexity AI for research

• Beehiiv for email marketing

• Hubspot or Salesforce for CRM 

• Shopify for store owners

• WordPress for web designers

Monetization strategies: 

• Build an educational course

• Be an affiliate partner for the platform. Affiliates typically earn a 20%-50% recurring commission.

• Lean into templates. This is a unique affiliate-ish strategy that should be high-converting. Imagine you have a newsletter about Mastering Hubspot. If you create a Hubspot template for subscribers, you can say  “Sign up through HubSpot through my affiliate link and I will give you the template for free.” Or “If you already have HubSpot, here’s a high-converting template that can be yours for $200.” 

• There are entire ecosystems and economies built around platforms. For example, if your newsletter is about Shopify websites, you can easily find a SaaS tool that would want to get in front of your readers.

3) Unofficial sports team newsletter

Find a Sports team with a big fan base but not much media coverage.

This could be your local team, a minor league team, a college team, an international team, etc.

Don’t start with something like the Dallas Cowboys. There’s already so much coverage on them.

Let’s discuss content.

Sourcing Content

Instead of writing your own content, go to subreddits and forums and select the best takes on your local teams. Link out to these takes or go one step further — DM the person behind it, asking them to contribute to your newsletter. 

Linking out is probably the best way to start. It removes the time and effort of content creation and lets you quickly scale horizontally.

You could easily create five unofficial local sports team newsletters quickly.

Monetize this through sponsors and creating paid Discord or FB communities. 

To turn this into a big business, you probably need a dozen newsletters for multiple teams. But it’s doable.

4) Local real estate investor newsletter

This works with cities or towns with around 200K - 1M people.

Here’s a good source for determining the population size. 

The target audience for this newsletter is local real estate investors who are looking to invest in that city/town. 

Here’s how you can do it: 

1. Go to Zillow, Redfin, or contact local realtors to discover the best available investment properties.  Once you know what to look for, you can probably outsource this to a virtual assistant for $500/month. 

2. Place 10-20 high-quality listings in each newsletter.

3. Enrich the listing by adding potential mortgage rates and forecasting potential returns on the investment. This added information will make your newsletter more valuable and interesting to read.

Newsletters like The Offer Sheet and Here.co do this for Airbnb properties.

How to grow:

• Use Facebook ads to build your subscriber list. Your CPA should be $2 or less.

• Promote your newsletter in local FB groups and subreddits. Just be careful how you do this because you don’t want to get banned for shilling. 

• Share pre and post-CTAs on social media to tease your newsletter content.

Send this newsletter out 1x per week to start.

As you sell more ad inventory, send it 3-5x per week. 

How to get your first ad sale

Let’s assume you have 1K-5K subscribers. I’d approach a local business, charge a flat fee, and run an ad for them until it gets the agreed amount of clicks. 

Here’s what this looks like:

• The sponsor and you agree to a certain number of clicks at a specific price. I’d aim for 500 clicks at $5 per. Charge an upfront flat rate of $2,500. 

• You will need to run the ad for multiple weeks to get 500 clicks, but that’s ok.

• Take that $2,500 and reinvest it in ad spend to get more subscribers. 

• Get more subscribers and close new sponsors at a higher rate.  

Local businesses with a high LTV that already work with real estate investors are the best sponsors for this type of newsletter.

For example:

• Lawyers

• Accountants

• Bankers

• Insurance brokers

• Realtors

• Property managers

What’s next? 

Once you have between 5K-10K subscribers and a steady stream of ad revenue, repeat this newsletter framework for another nearby city or town.  

You can scale horizontally by following this same model in 2 to 5 towns in the surrounding area.

Here are more ways you can monetize: 

• Selling your subscribers a local, in-person real estate investment seminar or event for $500-$1000 per seat.

• Offer premium subscriptions and put 50% of the properties behind a paywall for $1K/year.

The math:

• Assume a $2 CPA

• $5K/month budget = 2500 new subs/month

• Add 20 subscribers per day from organic social = 600 new subs/month

• Total new subs/month = 3,100

With a valuable audience of 3,000+ local real estate investors, you can start selling ads.

• Sell 3 “run until 500 clicks” ad campaigns for $2500 each month = $7,500

• If 2% of a 5k list purchases a $500 seminar and networking event, that’s $50k in sales (not including potential sponsorship revenue from the event)

• If 1% of a 5k list converts to your $1,000/year premium subscription, that’s $50k ARR

Total revenue = $190,000 annually with an audience of 5k-10k subscribers

Plus, the economics get better as you scale.

5) Newsletter for B2B Decision Makers

Create a newsletter for a valuable B2B audience of decision-makers. 

The beauty of this type of newsletter is you don’t need a HUGE list. If you have 2,000 subscribers and they’re all C-suite execs, you hit a home run.

Sponsors are desperate to get in front of these decision-makers.

The hardest part will be acquiring subscribers that fit your ICP (ideal customer profile). 

Here’s how to start: 

• Pick a niche and focus on one industry. For example, this could be CEOs at Fortune 500 oil and gas companies. 

The next step is acquiring subscribers.

As I said, it’s tough, but here are 3 approaches: 

1. Chat with an executive at a F500 company in your target industry. Ask about their information diet and what they want to read about. Then create content for that person. Eventually, ask them to introduce you to more people in their network. Ask those people what content they’re consuming.

2. Create hyper-relevant content that executives of the niche want to read. Do an analysis and summary of important press releases, product launches, executives hired and fired, internal strategies, earning reports, etc. Focus on saving readers time. Take all the information they normally consume and summarize it into a 5 to 10-minute newsletter.

3. Share this content on LinkedIn and Twitter to drive people to your newsletter.

4. Advertise in other newsletters that your ICP is reading. However, these ads may be expensive. As your audience grows, you can do cross-promos with these newsletters to grow for free.

The next part of this is CRITICAL to monetizing the newsletter. 

Create a survey after people subscribe. You can make it with Beehiiv’s Survey Forms. This survey should ask the following: 

• Job title

• Industry

• Company 

• Location

And more depending on your industry and audience.

Analyze the results to determine what percent of subscribers are your ICP and what percent are not. If you can say 50%+ of our subscribers are C-suite execs in X sector, you have serious leverage when selling sponsorships.

6) Niche Ad Examples for Media Buyers

Media buyers need to stay current and find ad creative examples to get better at their jobs.

Some newsletters do this, like Adprofessor (covers general ads and billboards) and Biddyco (DTC-focused).

However, there’s a lack of newsletters dedicated to ad creative for media companies, SaaS, info products, lead gen, and many more industries.

Create a newsletter that’s broken down into 3-4 sections. Each section should feature ads from a different niche.  

Here’s how:

• Create a spreadsheet and determine which niches you want to cover

• Source high-converting ads for each niche. Do this by going to meta ad library. Look for ads that have been live the longest on high-spending accounts— they're likely consistent high performers.

• Select 3-6 ads per niche. Add some context to each ad. This can be 1-2 sentences.

How to monetize: 

• Put 80% of the content behind a paywall and make Canva templates for each ad that subscribers can download.

• Sell sponsorships to advertisers that want to target paid marketers.

• Sell a community and/or course to your audience.

7) This week in memes

Most newsletters are text-based, but there are some great exceptions: 

• Chartr (acquired by Robinhood) - Visuals and infographics on business, finance, and technology.

• Smart Nonsense - Daily comic explaining nerdy stuff like you’re 5

• Bay Area Times - Visual daily newsletter on business and tech

But no newsletter explains the news with memes.

Here’s how it should work:

• Find a big story that happened that day or week

• Find a meme that represents or relates to the new story

• Write a witty and concise summary of the story in 100-250 words below the meme

Trung Phan does a great job of curating memes around business and tech news on Twitter — but I’ve never seen this done in a newsletter.

Creating one of these newsletters isn't rocket science.

• Cover 2-4 stories per day

• 1 meme for each story

• 100-250 word witty summaries for each

You don't need to make any memes from scratch. Find them on Reddit, Twitter, memelord tech, and other sources.

I’d recommend choosing a prosumer niche — focus on business, tech, investing, or finance. But this could work for general news, too.

Prosumer content has more monetization opportunities. 

8) Industry-specific AI tips and tactics

This idea is modeled after Write with AI. 

It’s a weekly paid newsletter that trains people how to write with AI.  They send a new ChatGPT / AI prompt to your inbox every week.

It costs $20/month or $200/year. They already have $200K in ARR through the paid newsletter subscription. 

You can take this concept and apply it to other categories like:

• AI for marketers

• AI for lawyers

• How to design with AI using Midjourney or DALL·E 

The key to creating a successful newsletter that people pay for off the bat is creating content that gives them the results.

People want cheat codes. Help your readers save time and money with AI tools and tactics. 

9) Lessons from Leaders/ Inspirational Figures

This newsletter would feature highlights and lessons learned from inspirational leaders.

This type of newsletter is trickier to monetize because there’s no clear niche, but it’s a great way to grow a broad audience fast.

The content also translates great to social.

If you need some ideas on leaders to profile, there are a lot of great podcasts that go in-depth on similar topics:

• How to take over the world

• Business breakdowns

• Founders podcast

• Acquired.FM

Rather than creating in-depth profiles on leaders (The Profile does a good job doing this), I would keep this newsletter short. 

2-5 minutes max.

Let’s say your niche is investors, and you profile Warren Buffett.

Create 3-4 sections that look like this: 

1. Best interview with Warren Buffet

2. Best quote from Warren Buffet

3. Best book about Warren Buffet

4. Best piece of advice from Warren Buffett

Remember, readers like predictable formats with short, actionable content. 

10) Local newsletters

Traditional media publications have shifted to digital platforms.

Local news still hasn't caught up.

There's a big opportunity for digestible local newsletters that focus on what people want— positive, community-oriented news, not crime-heavy local news stories. 

You could do a “Things to Do This Weekend” newsletter. Send it out on Thursday mornings and highlight local events, live music, food, and fun things to do.

Protip: Find locally sourced events that aren’t on Eventbrite.

Like events that are written on chalkboards at local cafes and bars. Things AI can't easily replicate. 

Acquiring Subscribers: 

To grow your audience, use FB ads. These FB ads should be pretty straightforward, like “Here are 5 Restaurants to try this weekend.” Once people click on the ad, it should link to a landing page where people can subscribe.

I’ve talked to (and helped) many local newsletters acquire subscribers for <$0.50

Monetization:

You can monetize the newsletter through local sponsorships, particularly from high lifetime value businesses like lawyers, realtors, and wealth managers.

Local newsletters can grow to 6-figure businesses in one city, with the potential to scale to 7-figures by expanding into multiple locations.

If you want to learn more about local newsletters, listen to our podcast interview with Ryan Snedden of Naptown Scoop, a local newsletter covering Annapolis, Maryland, that does $400k+ per year in revenue.

Also, check out the media start-ups that have had big outcomes from small local newsletters:

• 6 AM City grew to $8M+ in revenue and 1.4M+ subscribers

• The Charlotte Agenda was acquired by Axios for nearly $5M

Last Thing

Hope you enjoyed this!

Take the numbers and estimates I shared with a grain of salt. These are ideas. I believe those numbers (and better) are possible.

But everything depends on your execution.