Laura Nelson on How To Create a Profitable Newsletter

On the podcast today, we have Laura Nelson.

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You can listen to this episode (#41) HERE on the WPTavern website

Laura is a Content Marketer at WooCommerce where she’s responsible for creating and planning engaging content for their users.

Prior to WooCommerce she worked at MailPoet, an email marketing plugin for WordPress, and before that, she worked at Pragmatic, a UK based WordPress agency.

She’s on the show to share her experience about how you can, and why you might want to, set up a paid email newsletter.

When I hear the word newsletter, I’m typically thinking of the information which drops into your inbox on a regular basis. We’ve all surrendered our email addresses in return for some product or service. We agree to receive emails on the understanding that we can unsubscribe at some point. Perhaps a few of these emails really resonate with you, but it’s likely that you’ve unsubscribed from many as the content is no longer wanted.

This kind of email marketing is not always viewed favourably, and is not the kind of technique that Laura is on podcast to talk about.

Her pitch is that email newsletters can themselves be a product. That people will pay to receive your emails, and she’s got data and examples to back it up.

I suppose that the closest analogy would be people who create an online course. You have an area of expertise; you do the hard work of creating the course and people will pay for a membership to have the benefit of learning from your expertise.

Laura is describing something similar to that. The only difference being that instead of a course, people will pay to receive your emails, knowing that you’re going to bring value to them regularly.

I know that this can be done, because, as you will hear, I’m a subscriber of some of the emails which Laura mentions.

This is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s hard work and you’ve got to cultivate your audience and give them something of value, repeatedly.

Typically, when we record the podcast, there’s not a lot of background noise, but that’s not always the case with these WordCamp Europe interviews. We were competing against crowds and the air-conditioning. Whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope ‌you understand that the vagaries of the real world were at play.

You can find this article (and the audio podcast) in its entirety HERE on WP Tavern’s website