Everyone’s like…
“THE MONEY’S IN THE LIST”
“You HAVE to build an email list!”
“They can take your traffic but they can NEVER take your email list”
And yeah, that’s true.
But an email list is worthless if you don’t monetise it.
So today, I’m going to explain exactly how I make thousands of dollars each month from my travel blog’s email list.
Without investing ANY of my time.
Ready?
Let’s go
Investing none of my time means that I’ve trained someone to do it for me.
This is pretty easy with email as it’s essentially the exact same tasks every week.
(Note: That would never work for this NSL email! I’ll always write this one myself)
Outsourcing is something that I’ve always struggled with.
I think many of us have.
But I’m very lucky to have finally found someone to create great emails for my travel blog.
I pay this person a set fee per week, and they follow this exact strategy that I created.
We send 2 emails per week…
1. The news email
This is a round-up of travel news from the week.
It has links to about 5 articles on the blog.
Most of these are news articles that have been written by converting press releases into blog posts with ChatGPT.
We also make news articles from viral TikTok videos or things we’ve spotted in Facebook groups.
The others are new or recently updated blog posts that have a wide appeal.
This email makes money purely from display ads on the site.
2. The deals email
The second email is a round-up of the best travel deals from the week.
It has about 5 affiliate links to the best deals we come across.
Sometimes, brands pay to have their deals here.
I haven’t done any outreach to sell those spots, but that’s our next step.
This is segmented by country, so I send a UK version and a US version. I may add more countries as the list grows.
Other monetisation methods
I also use both emails to sell my digital product – a travel planner.
And I sometimes use them to drive traffic to my latest YouTube videos, which I make money from.
This is a pretty simple set-up, and I love how hands-off it is now.
Things to know…
One of the most important things when it comes to email marketing is the subject line.
This directly impacts the click-through rate.
So a great subject line can double the revenue from the email!
The second most important thing to know is that your job isn’t to sell anything.
It’s just to get someone to click a link.
You can let the landing page of the product you’re linking to do the selling.
All you need to do is get them there.
For both of these, the key is intrigue.
You want someone to think – “I wonder what’s in this email”, so they open it.
Then, “I want more details about this”, so they click.
Your work is done.
Communicating this clearly to my email manager took a little bit of time, as it’s a little counterintuitive.
But now we’ve cracked it, I can leave them to take care of the emails without my involvement.
If only I could be so hands off with the blog content!
I’m working on that.
Until next time,
– NSL
P.S. If I don’t reply to any comments, I apologise. I’m moving house today! Finally getting that sea view I’ve always wanted.
Keep working hard and know that you’re 5 years away from any view you dream of.