[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.
Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress can be the backbone of a profitable newsletter.
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So on the podcast today, we have Laura Nelson.
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 explore her experience of how you can, and while you might want to set up a paid email newsletter.
When I hear the word newsletter, I’m typically thinking about the information which drops into your inbox on a daily 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 unsubscribed from many as the content was no longer wanted. This kind of email marketing is not always viewed favorably, and it’s not the kind of technique that Laura is talking about on the podcast today. 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 to some of the emails which Laura mentioned.
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. And whilst the podcasts are more than listenable, I hope that you understand
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This article was written by Nathan Wrigley and originally published on WP Tavern.