Learn from the Best

Happy (Reve) New Year!

🧀 I took a break from writing over Christmas to focus exclusively on consuming optimal quantities of cheese.

4kg of brie aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

1. Incredible sponsorship results = incredible revenue.

2. Recommended reading

3. Newsletter News

4. Inbox Banter

Last week, I sat down with Stefan, the CEO of Alts.co, a newsletter-first financial community all about alternative investments.

Why you should listen to him?

From my Finimize days, I’ve watched Alts:

• Grow to now over 230k newsletter subs

• Build a comprehensive evergreen content site

• Launch an alternative investment fund

• Organize an investor field trip to Mexico 

Alts punch above their weight in terms of revenue & campaign performance. During my time chasing deals, I’ve spoken to numerous brands directly who’ve said their Alts campaign was hugely successful.

I’ve extracted the most valuable parts of our chat for you today.

🤝 What promotional products do you offer brands?

“Firstly, we stopped selling anything that didn’t drive consistent clicks/results. We now focus almost exclusively on dedicated deep dives, the format is usually a deep dive into an alternative asset offering, or the brand’s platform.

This enables us to tell their story, in our own personal way. We take the brand under our wing and write something that really matters. Every single word is written by us. These aren’t ‘puff pieces’ like you often see. We talk about the bull and the bear case in our campaigns, which in addition to maintaining integrity, also builds trust with the reader. It’s just better.

We focus on having fewer, more meaningful sponsors. This means only working with super-relevant brands, plus bigger campaigns with partners that see the value of top/mid-funnel engagement. Basically, the exact opposite of using a generic ad-network.

1440 is another great example, they create the all ad copy themselves, and the results follow.”

🖇️ Seems like campaigns flow naturally out of your content, was this planned?

“We’re lucky that our topic and format enable us to do this without sacrificing the reader relationship. We often start editorial content with the client in mind, and work backwards from there. It all feels natural and organic. Hence, campaigns doing exactly this, have excellent performance AND perception.

The fundamentals of creating winning campaigns can be simplified to matching up content & timing (for your audience).”

🫣 How do you start most of your sales pitches?

“Firstly, we qualify strictly and only work with brands that our readers will love.

We find out exactly what they’re looking for and ask about their ICP, minimum investments (etc.). We ensure that we can deliver for them.

Then we ensure that the Venn Diagram (of our offering and their goals) is just one big double-layered circle.

We are dedicated, relevant, personal and genuinely on their side. We then gear our content calendar entirely around the sponsor to maximise impact.”

🔒 What’s your process for getting renewals?

“One word. Overdeliver.

If we estimated 1,000 clicks, we them 1,300. If we promised half a million opens, we deliver and an extra 100,000. We do whatever it takes to overdeliver.

We make the ads interesting and only work with interesting brands, this makes the passion bleed into the campaign effortlessly. How individual publishers go about achieving that will differ depending on their resources. For us, the extra time/money spent overdelivering is a great investment.”

🏆 The one piece of advice you’d give to newsletter operators to optimise revenue?

“Diversify Revenue Streams.

Historically, we could’ve done a better job at this, I wish we’d started sooner. Today we are well-diversified. We have regular sponsors, fallback affiliates, our ALTS 1 Fund, an All-Access Pass (paid subscription), investor field trips, and our upcoming alternative dealflow service for Accredited Investors.

Why is this important?

Media is a bumpy source of revenue, it’s not as sexy as recurring SaaS revenue. So if you’re relying on a single product, this leaves you extremely vulnerable to inevitable dips in revenue. Plus the risk of algorithm changes or sudden deliverability issues. If you have a secondary or tertiary source of money then these potential problems are minimised, or at least mitigated.”

🧐 Recommended Partner

Getting your first few hundred or thousand subscribers is a grind (hi to those subscribers here that I Twitter DM’ed!).

Organic growth is great and all, but it will only get you so far.

The inconvenient truth is that every newsletter 20k subs heavily relies on paid growth.

If you take your newsletter seriously, it’s essential. But, it’s also f*cking hard, especially if, like me, you’re not a marketer. 

To master paid acquisition, you need:

• Cutting-edge strategies for Meta, TikTok, and X.

• Eye-catching ads – static and video – that magnetize subscribers.

• Scalable techniques that maintain low CAC with high engagement.

Instead of spending heaps of time learning or doing all these things yourself, you should just pay Alota to do it for you.

Alota are veterans in running profitable ads for 8-figure e-commerce brands. Now, they’re bringing their expertise to the newsletter space.

I personally know the CEO Leevi, they know their stuff. Alota are offering an awesome deal:

• Handle all ad creative costs, including professional UGC videos.

• Deploy battle-tested media buying strategies on Meta, TikTok, and more.

• A bold promise: 100% money-back guarantee if you're unsatisfied (excluding Ad Spend).

• No strings attached – no contracts, leave anytime.

Let's Talk Paid Acquisition for Newsletters.

Worst case scenario? You walk away with invaluable media buying insights, absolutely free.

🧐 Recommended Reading

Another cool newsletter newsletter.

Discover How an Ultra-Busy Father of Three is Building a Six-Figure Newsletter in Just One Hour a Day!

Subscribe to Newsletter Alchemy here.

📰 Newsletter News

🤝 Chartr is acquired by Robinhood! Huge congrats to the team!

🤝 Literally Media Acquires Mel Magazine, the why is insightful.

🤝 A HUGE podcast deal, the 2 key factors: audiences and advertisers.

🤖 NYT sues OpenAI, for copyright infringement (GPT using their content). This is an important case.

👏 Google is ending the cookie, making targeting trickier for marketers. Enter newsletters.

Competition is heating up in the sponsorship data space, my friend Wouter recently launched Openrates to help you track other newsletters for $99/month.