Reinventing the Entrepreneur: Turning Your Dream Business into a Reality

Chapter 18

Let’s Start Monetizing: The Smart Way

Let’s talk about making money to monetize your inbox magazine. First, you need to know what a reasonable monetary goal is. Your goal is to achieve between 50 cents and $1 per subscriber every month. So if you have a list size of 10,000 subscribers, your goal is to make $5,000 to $10,000 per month. Now you understand the importance of building your list from the previous chapter.

To achieve this revenue goal, you can do affiliate promotions, sell advertising, and of course, sell your own products. Indirectly, you can also monetize your list through live events and webinars, public speaking, high-dollar consulting, and book sales. Your indirect methods will most likely come after you have a sizeable list and widely recognized inbox magazine, so focus on the direct methods first.

Affiliate Promotions

The easiest way to make money with an inbox magazine is with affiliate promotions. When you are first getting started, you need to run ads. Instead of selling traditional advertisement “space,” you’ll be displaying ads that you wrote or revised yourself, which link to an affiliate’s site.

When one of your subscribers clicks on your link and buys a product from the affiliate’s site, you get a commission from that sale.

The reason affiliate programs work so well is because you’re not relying on a computer to match up ads to your content. You do it yourself. You know best what ads would work with your content and which products your customers ...