Win more deals 📊

Welcome to the seventh edition of Revenews (a smarter man might say Sevenews).

📊 For a free hour-long consulting call, you now only need 5 referrals, down from 10! So, if you’d like a deep dive into your newsletter operations, use my referral scheme at the bottom…

Desperate attempts for more readers aside, lets dive in ! 🚀

1. Get over the ‘affiliate objection’

2. Insights into successful newsletters

3. Generate $11k with a course launch

4. Inbox Banter

^{What do you do when a prospect asks to run on an affiliate basis?}

In sponsorship sales, flat fee is of course the preferable pricing model for the publisher (you). Vice versa, affiliate/referral models are optimal for the media buyer.

A common ad sales objection, especially in tighter economic times, is: “this seems interesting, are you able to run via our affiliate scheme”. Or something along those lines.

Let’s look at strategies you can use to try and ‘overcome’ that objection.

Affiliate marketing does have a place in newsletter monetisation, typically, it’s best to be ancillary to (flat fee) sponsorships, as we’ve discussed previously.

🥇 Understand why?

Whilst it might be annoying, it’s a very reasonable suggestion from the marketer, they are simply trying to minimise, or completely eradicate, the risk of trying an untested channel (which is what you are). You’d do the same if you were them. Once you accept this, you can start to have an honest, non-combative conversation.

Think, what are they actually saying, beneath the surface..?

“I don’t trust it’ll work, I’m not sure I trust you, I don’t want to look stupid at work, but I am interested, so please structure this so you take all the risk.”

Once you accept this, you can address the 🐘 in the room, and label the prospect/situation, which is likely to be disarming and foster an honest, problem solving environment. Try something like this:

“Doing this on an affiliate basis, from your perspective, is an optimal and responsible way to approach a new channel. The problem on our side is that we simply don’t have any control/visibility over our partners’ funnel , so whilst we back the quality of our audience, doing affiliate initially means stomaching all the risk without all the control. I’m sure we can figure out a way to get this off the ground…”

You’ve acknowledged what they’re already thinking, and now you can work together to try find common ground.

Conversely, simply trying to convince them about how awesome your audience is, or why flat fee is better, will come across as you doing exactly that, trying to convince them. Which ironically, will not convince them.

🧱 Become trustworthy

As mentioned, part of the problem is that they might not fully trust you, your company, audience, or campaigns. If they’ve never heard of you before, why should they?

Building trust will (unsurprisingly) help. Here’s a few quick-fire ways you can build trust in the newsletter-sponsorships-game:

• Show screenshots of newsletter metrics.

• Case studies with similar, reputable companies.

• Use testimonials, ideally not anonymous, get as specific as possible in the quote.

• Offer references.

• Structure unfavourable payment terms for yourself.

• Offer guarantees, but be careful with this.

• Sell to people you know, or more specifically, who know you.

This previous edition went a little deeper into trust-building.

⚖️ Let them crunch the numbers

This has worked quite a few times, but also has left me chasing ghosted proposals too, which comes with the territory. This is a sound strategy if you’re 100% opposed to affiliate deals.

During the call, politely tell them you don’t do affiliate. Then ask if they’re opening to considering flat fee or CPM deals. If they say yes (most will), you can lay out the next steps like this:

“I’ll send you all the numbers, audience, open rate, CTR, etc. You can then crunch the numbers and let me know if this makes sense to move ahead.”

Then do that, they’ll plug your numbers into their models and if it looks like they’ll see ROI, then they probably will be keen. However, as newsletters aren’t a cheap channel, you may have to offer steep discounts to fit their models. Which is up to you. Using discounts will be a deep dive topic soon!

🏁 Explore both, and give them a choice

If you do consider affiliate deals, an effective way to steer the conversation back to flat fee territory, is this:

“In the same way that you prioritise affiliate deals, as you should, we prioritise flat fee campaigns, for our own selfish reasons. We are considering affiliate deals though, I have a spreadsheet and will be implementing the best offers in the newsletter. But to be honest this will likely bump this partnership way down our priority list, but please do send me the affiliate details. If you’d like to get this off the ground in the near future then let’s see if we can make the flat fee approach work.”

🧐 Recommended Reading

I had an awesome chat last week with Çiler, who runs Newsletter Circle. She teaches you how to take your newsletter to the next level.

How? In-depth weekly interviews with successful creators about how they built their publications from scratch. You'll find their growth, monetisation strategies, key performance metrics, tech stack, learnings, recommendations and more.

I’ve been reading it for ages, if you haven’t, SUBSCRIBE NOW. Genuine no-brainer if you’re in newsletter land.

P.S. The recent edition with Michael Houck was very insightful

📰 Newsletter Stuff

🤝 How she made a 6-figure newsletter business in 4 months.

📈 How to make a course that does $11k in week one!

🤖 Readers not subscribers, a great read on increasing engagement by being personal.

👂 Listen: How to build a paid community, and more.

🙀 BEWARE of sponsorship scams, yes they’re a thing.

🤣 Inbox Banter

Someone sent me a donut in an email.

It was an e-clair.