Very boring, but it works

The business model everyone overlooks

Author

Ian H
January 30, 2025

I’m talking about a business model that’s been around since the dawn of the internet.

It’s the most resilient model I know of.

And yet, most people overlook it (myself included).

I’m referring to boring old email marketing.

  • Grow an email list

  • Send emails with a link to read more on your site

  • Profit

Grow a large enough list and send emails often enough, and you can make an excellent living. And, your income won’t be taken away by a Google update. It won’t be taken away by any platform update, because you OWN the list of emails.

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This is the business model Scott DeLong used to make millions of dollars.

It’s the main way John Stachini makes money from his travel blog.

Many niche site owners have pivoted to email marketing with great success. Niche Site Lady is a good example.

In her latest income report, she revealed her site got 822,246 sessions from email marketing in 2024, more than double the year before.

Every niche site owner should focus more on email marketing

This goes for myself too.

I haven’t fully embraced email marketing despite knowing how effective it is.

I’ve grown this newsletter to nearly 8,000 subscribers. I often get hundreds of clicks per email.

And, I have a related site, nichesitegrowth.com. It gets very little traffic. I haven’t done anything with it in the last year and a half.

If I were smart, I would publish super interesting articles on it (like I do here in my newsletter), and write an email for this list directing people to read the full article on my site.

I’ve done this a bit in the past, and regularly get 300-500 clicks to my site.

If I sent daily emails with links to my site, that could equate to 10,000+ visitors/mo to my site, qualifying it for Mediavine Journey - from email traffic alone.

And the more I grow this list, the more traffic I could drive to my site.

Is it worth it?

This question is the reason I haven’t done what I laid out above.

With 8,000 subscribers, and, let’s say 400 clicks per send, that’s just a bit over the minimum traffic required for Mediavine Journey ads.

I’d probably make around $500/mo. Not bad, until you consider it would require daily emails (every email takes me several hours to write).

I also have to consider the opportunity cost of not focusing on other side projects that have a better potential to generate passive income.

Maybe I’ll try it for a bit just to get a taste for how much more effort it would require. Doing that is the only way to find out.

This thing would make it 100% worthwhile…

There is one thing that would easily make it worth doing.

More subscribers.

If I had 10x the number of subscribers I currently have, I could make $5,000/mo, almost guaranteed.

And that’s just from ad revenue.

Affiliate revenue and sales of my own products would probably be even higher. The total would more likely be north of $10,000/month.

And that is worth spending a few hours a day cranking out a new blog post and email.

Getting more subscribers

The beautiful thing about email marketing is that it requires the same amount of work regardless of the number of subscribers.

When I had 100 subscribers, it took me several hours to write each email, and I made $0.

With 8,000 subscribers, it still takes several hours per email, but I make just enough to cover most of my essential living expenses.

With 80,000 subscribers, it would still take several hours per email, but I’d be making more than most software developers.

So, the goal is to grow a bigger list.

There are many ways to do that. Facebook ads, social media, YouTube, SEO, and so on.

If you want to learn more about email marketing for niche sites, remember to sign up for the email marketing course from today’s sponsor. It’s 100% free.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this email was inspiring!

Ian

P.S. I was in the middle of writing this when I saw Jon from Fat Stacks Blog emailed about the same subject lol! Guess today’s message is to start focusing on email marketing?

P.P.S. See the top 100 sites monetized by Mediavine (by traffic) and the top 100 on Raptive. These datasets include estimated traffic, DA, site age, and more! Super interesting to look through.

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