There are a number of services that make it easy for you to send out a newsletter. Some are email marketing services, like Constant Contact and MailChimp, which “helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use and track your results.” MailChimp is more basic and user-friendly that Constant Contact, which offers more customization and features of interest to professional marketers (rather than the small business owner who is the marketing department).
MailChimp also offers a free service called Tiny Letter “for people who don’t need the bells and whistles MailChimp offers.” Tiny Letter provides just the basics: It lets people subscribe to your newsletter and lets you send a letter to everyone who’s subscribed to your newsletter (via a simple web-based interface). It’s roughly equivalent to sending out an email to a list of your friends. The differences are that people can subscribe or unsubscribe without bothering you to add or remove their names from your list, and a subscriber can only reply to you—they can’t “reply all” or even see who else subscribes. One nice feature is that you can send yourself a preview of the letter, just to see how it looks.
Of course, that’s great for a free newsletter, but what if you want to get paid for the information you’re providing? For example, what if you’re setting up a tip sheet for the horse races at the county fair, selling stock recommendations or providing parents with a new bedtime story for their kids each night? Tiny Letter lets you do this as well (although it’s hidden under “Show even more settings” on the “Design and Settings” page). It offers the option of collecting the money for you or using your existing PayPal account.
Another paid-subscription offering comes from Letter.ly. The basic differences are that subscribers have to pay through Amazon payments, and, rather than editing online, you send an email to an @letter.ly email address that’s known only to you. Letter.ly takes 3.5 percent of your subscription revenue in return for handling all the details. The Amazon payments service is often overlooked, which surprises me, since by now, it seems everyone in America has ordered from Amazon, which makes it easy for them to pay this way.
As a columnist, I find the idea of getting paid for a newsletter intriguing, since my column is sort of like a monthly newsletter bundled up in your subscription. This magazine costs $30 per year, or about $2.50 an issue (even less if you count special issues), and averages 82 pages. On that basis, my approximately 1,000 words each month represent about $0.04 worth of value. Even less, because there’s the cost of printing, binding and mailing that page to you. Fortunately, our benevolent publisher, Norm Rosinski pays me pretty well (although not the $100 a word that Michael Lewis reportedly receives for his articles in Vanity Fair), and believes “Tech Talk” delivers value to his subscribers. Right, Norm?
Anyway, how much is information worth, particularly when so much information is now freely available on the Internet? It’s hard to imagine, for example, getting paid for a recipe newsletter. And yet, people still buy cookbooks. What makes information valuable? Accuracy, for sure—an accurate prediction of the future price of a stock would be worth quite a bit of money. Availability as well, since information that’s generally available is less valuable than information known only to a few. (In some circles, this is known as “insider trading.”) People will pay for convenience as well. While it’s possible to download movies from the Internet for free, most people pay for a service like Netflix, Hulu or iTunes. Although I can search for information on the Internet, I’m willing to pay for an article or book that’s already done the legwork for me.
But of all the factors that add value to information, perhaps the most important is whether that information meets some need. I don’t need any more celebrity information than I already get, so I don’t need to subscribe to People magazine.
Do I have any information that anyone needs? Probably. Right now, I’m working on a new website for Who2, a biography site that I’ve been hacking on with three friends for over 10 years. According to Google Analytics (free information!), it gets about 1 million page views per month (about 250,000 unique visitors). We’re moving to a new publishing platform (called Drupal) from our home-brewed solution, and right now, it’s slower than we’d like, particularly since Google now “punishes” you in your search ranking if your site is slow. In terms of response time, we’d really like the new site to be in the top 20 percent of sites Google designates as “fast.” Worst case, we don’t want the new site to be any slower than our old one. That’s tricky, because the visually-appealing design of our new site sends a lot more data to a visitor’s browser.
We’ve talked to companies that specialize in performance tuning for Drupal sites. They charge from $165 to $245 per hour for their expertise. The initial quote from one company was $14,000—much more than we can afford to spend. So, I’m learning a lot about website optimization, in general, and Drupal optimization, in particular. At the end of this process, I imagine I could write an ebook about the process that would let technically savvy people follow a formula to diagnose performance problems with their Drupal-based websites. Even at $100 a copy, it would be much less than a hour on consulting time. Heck, $49.95 would be a bargain! And I could probably charge money for a monthly newsletter with a (new) performance optimization tip. Perhaps I will…assuming I successfully resolve our performance problems, of course.
Think about it: You probably know things your customers would find valuable. You don’t have to charge for them. Giving away knowledge is a terrific way to add value for your customers. The truth is, even when people know how you do something, they’re probably willing to pay to have you, the expert, take care of them. What’s the best way to share the valuable information inside your head? Let me tell you about Tiny Letter and Letter.ly, two services that….
