TIE #072: How to Make $8,099 in a Single Month with a Newsletter

Here are the financial results for August for the Introvert Entrepreneur newsletter

Your first step to escaping the rat race is making your first $1,000 online.

The best way to accomplish this as a beginner is with a simple Amazon business where you sell other people’s products.

It worked for me 10 years ago and it’s what I would do if I had to start over from scratch today.

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Welcome to the monthly performance update for this newsletter where we see how much money it makes over a single month.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I love sharing how much profit my different businesses make.

Actually, that’s a lie.

I love it when other people share how much profit their businesses make but hardly anyone does.

So I said: “Fine, I’ll do it myself”

What you are reading today (and on several other occasions every month) is the result.

Let’s take a look at what the newsletter did in August:

Total subscribers gained: -32

Something odd happened in August for the first time ever.

We lost subscribers but I didn’t do any pruning.

This means people went out of their way to ensure they don’t see anymore of my posts or emails.

I have some possible explanations for this:

1. Readers saw a few posts on social media they didn’t like (that I posted as a joke)

2. The economy has people in a worse place financially and they are no longer interested (or capable) in trying to escape the 9-5 lifestyle

3. My subscription rate has decreased and this type of unsubscribing has always happened

(Feel free to chime in with your observations in the comments below)

I’m mostly okay with this because if either of the first two are true, they likely weren’t committed to reading what I post about anyway.

In effect, they’re doing the pruning for me.

If the latter is true, I need to find out if we have seen a drop in inbound traffic.

Next up, paid subscribers:

Paid subscribers gained: -12

You can probably say the same about paid subscribers.

As I’ve said before, I want my paid subscriber base to stay exclusive.

I have no intention on growing this beyond 1,000 paid subscribers.

Next we have traffic:

Total Views: 110,502 (-12,581 vs. July)

As expected, views dropped again for the second month in a row.

This is a little deceiving because we only sent out 8 posts in August vs. 9 in July.

With that in mind, views stayed roughly the same.

Seeing the traffic sources will paint a better picture for us:

Here are these results compared to March (a great month for traffic):

• Email: -28,439 views (despite 2,500 less subscribers)

• Direct: -3,759 views (I don’t know what “Direct” means)

• Substack App: +1,592 views

• TikTok: -414 views

• Twitter/X: -1,105 views

• Instagram: -253 views

• Facebook: -2,401 views

• YouTube: -108 views

• Google: -322 views

As you can see, we have seen a drop in just about every category this year.

From this we can conclude a few things:

1. Less people are opening my emails

2. Less people are coming to the newsletter from social media

If I had to guess, I believe the largest culprit is the economy.

Second to that is it being an election year, which would explain the drop in social media traffic.

I don’t think the newsletter itself or what I write about is the problem.

Here is how much money we made from paid subscriptions in August:

Total Profit: $8,099.26 (-$2,686.90 vs. July)

Not only did traffic drop, but revenue dropped too.

This is an all-encompassing trend.

Traffic has dropped, subscribers have dropped, and revenue has dropped.

For the most part, I haven’t really changed anything on social media.

This means the results are out of my control and there isn’t much I can do about it.

I am at peace with that.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around.

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