Making Newsletters Pay
So you’ve created your content, and now you need to make it pay.
First off, there’s the outsourcing options.
Ko-Fi allows you to set up a Tip Jar, where people can leave one-off payments.
Patreon allows people to subscribe, paying a regular amount to go past your paywall. Terms and conditions apply, Patreon expects you to host content on their site.
Substack allows you to gather followers, but (even ignoring their views on free speech for nazis) it’s a trap. Because when you drill down, they’re not really your followers, they’re Substack’s followers.
The other option is to build your own.
All platforms degrade over time, the only way to truly build an audience is to use every other platform to point people to your own website.
Create once, share everywhere.
Stripe is a fairly powerful tool, and allows you to set up your own subscription or tip jar options on your site.
You can probably do the same with PayPal, but I’ve always found it a bit more clunky than Stripe, plus I really don’t like some of the owners, so I use Stripe where I can. On the other hand, there’s the advantage that almost everyone has a Paypal (or everyone of a certain age; I suspect Revolut is winning over the younger crowd).
You can also find tools to build your own paywalls, or you can follow the Guardian model. Allow everyone to access your site, but also offer a Subscription Supporter option, while understanding that only a minority of readers will contribute.
Making Podcasts Pay
All of the above also applies to podcasts, though with venues like Spotify instead of Substack. You can also look at advertising, either pre-roll services which insert a commercial automatically, or though sponsorship and advertising you sell yourself.
